Читать книгу The Quenchless Light - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 6

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The old Idumean soldier of the Prætorian Guard sat on the stone bench in front of his prisoner’s hut on the canal road to Rome and listened to the drunken songs coming from the bargemen at the place called the Three Taverns.

It was a fair evening in spring. Frogs piped from the marshes. Oleander and apricot bloom drugged the night with dreams. The sun hung over the far sea in a warrior shield, and the dust from the chariot wheels filtered the air with powdered gold.

The Spring Festival was over. The corn ships from Egypt had come in to Naples on time for the free gifts to peasant and slave. All Rome seemed out in holiday attire, on foot, on barge, on horseback, or in chariot, either going home to the hill towns, or down to the villas by the sea. The plodding peasants and slaves had their little bags of free corn and goatskins of wine flung over their shoulders, and were followed by their wives and their children as they turned off up to the hills, where their bonfires were already aglow with flamy eyes in the blue shadows of the mountains, for all-night revels.

On the canal and its paved road passed an endless procession of the great and the rich. Litters, palanquins, chairs, with black Nubian slaves between the poles, went surging past with the patter of the runners’ bare feet on the pavement and the glimpse of painted face or jeweled, pointed hand, when the breeze blew the silk curtains from the latticed windows. Barges, with black-faced slaves chained to the iron rowlocks and gayly clad men and women lolling on the ivory benches beneath awnings and pennants of white, red and gold, went gliding down the canal with a drip of water from the oars colored in the dusty air like a rainbow. Then there would be the sharp ring of iron-shod hoofs over the cobblestones—a centurion with his hundred horsemen riding in rhythm as one man, their three-edged lances aslant, would gallop seaward, followed by the whirl of gold-rimmed chariot wheels, when some general or senator went flashing past to take his pastime for the night down in his grand villa by the sea.

The old Idumean soldier of the Prætorian Guard glanced in the hut to see that all was well with the prisoner inside, glanced toward the Three Taverns, whence came louder songs and wilder revels, loosened his metal headpiece, laid the helmet on the stone bench beside him, and, with another glance up and down the thronged road, raised a bronze tankard of wine and drained it to the lees. Smacking his lips, he set it down and began eating some bread and cheese, when the revels in the Three Taverns rose to the tumult of a noisy brawl. A figure darted out of the dense road crowds, running like a deer, pursued by a rabble of drunken bargemen armed with pikes.

The fugitive dashed along the stone parapet of the canal, looking wildly to right and left, frantic for a way of escape. Then the figure dived into the thronged road, as if the crowd would afford best hiding, in and out among the plodding peasants, who scattered from the road in panic, with the bargemen in full cry behind shouting, “Stop him!—stop him!—slave!—slave!—runaway slave!”

The old Idumean guard had sprung up with sword in his right hand for a slash at the flying figure, when a great hue and cry rent the confusion.

“Make way—make way—the Emperor!” and a centurion band galloped through the dust, clearing the road with their long lances.

There was a flash of gold-rimmed chariot wheels with flying horses in a blur. There was the figure of a youthful man with a bare head and shaved face, holding the reins far out as charioteers drive; and Nero’s royal equipage had passed in a smoke of dust with a great shout from the barge travelers, who clapped their hands and rose and waved their flags. The fleeing figure, the pursuing bargemen, and the drunken rabble had melted; and a little form crumpled up in the doorway of the prison hut, panting as if its lungs would burst.

The old Prætorian guard stood motionless, sword in hand.

The pursuing rabble had disappeared back to the drunken revels in the Three Taverns.

The old Idumean drove his sword back in its scabbard with a clank.

Then he surveyed the figure lying prone at his feet.

A thin voice called softly from the dark of the prison hut: “Who is there, my Julius? My eyes grow poor. I cannot see in this light. I thought I heard some one running in distress.”

“Nothing—nothing—Master! ’Twas only that madman Emperor of ours passed in his mad race with his proselyte Jewess Queen. You heard only the knaves of the Three Taverns noisy in their cups.”

The crumpled figure had not looked up, but lay panting on its face. A green-and-white turban, such as mountaineers wear, had fallen off. The hair was gold as the golden light of the sunset and hung in unshorn curls about the neck. There were the sky-blue jacket of the Asiatic Greeks, the scarlet trousers and pointed red soft kid sandals of a page; but the garments were torn as if snatched by the pack of human wolves.

The burly Idumean guard smiled till his teeth shone like ivory tusks through his grizzled beard.

“No runaway this, but some grandam’s lackey,” he smiled. “Is it boy or girl?”

He touched the prone, panting figure with his boot. The form did not rise. It crouched upon its knees, and, with face hidden in hands, bowed the head at the soldier’s feet.

An evil-faced old woman with bleared eyes and wiry, disarranged gray hair came swaying drunkenly up from the Three Taverns and paused, peering.

“Off out of this, harpy, snake of the dirt—sniff earth!” the soldier clanked his scabbard against the metal of his leg greaves, “back to your wine-shop den. I’ll question you later of this! We’ll have none of you here—” and the leering woman vanished in the gathering dusk.

The soldier sat down on his stone bench.

“Up—boy or girl, whichever you are—help me unbuckle my breastplate and greaves!”

The figure sprang up with the nimbleness of youth. The eyes were blue with the terror of a frightened girl, the cheeks were burned with the tan of a hillside grape, and the lips were fine and full as the caressed lips of a child. The long, slim hands had slid off the metal breastplate of the Prætorian, and were unbuckling the greaves of an outstretched leg, when the soldier’s great hand closed on the slim wrist and twisted the palm upward.

“No slave you! No callus here! No gyve marks on the wrists! You’ve never worked among the galley slaves—my little runaway! Thighs too thin and shoulders too slim for these foreign swine we bring to Rome in droves. Where do you come from, young one?”

“From the mountains of Lebanon, my Lord Julius,” answered the downcast face.

The Idumean gave a start. “How know you the Romans call me Julius?” he sharply asked. “I’m an Idumean of Herod the Great’s Guard.”

“Because you were commander on the Alexandrian corn ship that carried all the Jewish prisoners wrecked at Malta,” answered a trembling voice in the falsetto between youth and man.

“You were not among the prisoners, young one—nor sailors either! I recall them—to a man. I’ll test your truth. Mind your tongue! Describe the ship, the passengers, the prisoners.”

“I took ship at Fair Havens, Crete. I came down from Phrygia. You remember the Prophet, who was a prisoner from Cæsarea, wanted you to tarry there for the winter?”

“By Jupiter, I do; and now I wish I had, for I’d be back in Idumea, leading our General Vespasian’s cohorts if I hadn’t wrecked that accursed corn ship, and not be cooling my heels here, waiting the trial of these Jewish fanatics—what next? Describe what next—the ship?”

“The ship had a golden goose at the stern. It was full of Egyptian corn to the rowers’ benches. She was deep as she was broad, and long as from here to the Three Taverns—”

“Go on! You guess well and may lie better—all corn ships are the same—”

“She had flaming pennants and huge iron anchors and two monstrous oars as paddles that you used as rudders, and the pilot at the helm was a bald-headed old man—”

“They all are—these Greeks—from wearing caps so tight. Any bargeman at the Taverns could have told you that. Go on—”

“And she had only one little boat astern, that almost swamped in the mountain waves; and when the northeaster struck her you were afraid of being driven to Africa, and cut the great mainmast and threw her overboard, and drifted for fourteen days, four hundred miles; and when the hull sprang a leak and strained to split apart you frapped her round and round with great cables and trussed her up as cooks tie up the legs of a fowl! And when the soldiers would have sprung into the little boat, you cut her adrift; and when you would have slain the prisoners to prevent escape, and slain yourself to avoid punishment for the loss, it was the Prophet, who is the prisoner in your hut there, stopped your hand and foretold you not a soul would lose his life. Then you cast the cargo overboard.

“No stars, no sun we saw for fourteen days, only the clouds and the pelting rain, and fogs so thick a sword could cut them. When the breakers and the surf roared ahead, you heaved and heaved and heaved the lead, and knew we were driving straight ashore to wreck in the breakers, and you cast four great iron anchors out astern to hold her back; but they only combed the fine sand as a housekeeper’s knife cuts dough. The shore of Malta Bay was soft as paste. The pumps you set to work; but she settled on her prow, like a swine’s snout in mud, with her goose-beaked stern, high in the crash of waves, breaking to splinters—”

“Stop!” cried the Idumean. “I’ll test your truth right there! The bargemen of the Taverns might have told you all the rest. When the ship broke and the sailors and the prisoners plunged over in the pelting dark to swim for it, what said the Prophet, who is my prisoner, then?”

“When you could not look the wind in the eye, my Lord Julius, the Prophet bade you be of good cheer and thanked his strange Judean God, whom he called Christus, that he was reaching Rome.”

“By Jupiter, child,” cried the guard, with a crash of his sword on the stone bench, “you have spoken truth! What next? Be careful how you answer—your life hangs on it if you are slave! It is death to harbor a runaway in Roman law—”

“I know not what next, my Lord Julius; for Publius, the Governor of Malta, took all your shipwrecked crew in, and you tarried to come by the Castor and Pollux on to Neapolis (Naples) while I took secret passage on a fishing vessel and reached Rome first.”

The Idumean then knew the youth spoke truth; but not all the truth—what more? Here was a lad of noble birth and clad in a page’s garments, caught and held and hounded by the harpies of the wine shops amid the rascal loafers of the underworld—lost in the gutters of Rome for two full years. Whose son was he and why was he here?

The old guard’s manner changed. Could he find the boy’s parents there might be money in it—honest money—not the kidnapper’s ransom for which the knavish criminals of the Three Taverns had tried to steal him; but the old soldier knew he must proceed cautiously. No gain to frighten a startled bird that had fallen in your hand; a gift of gold from the gods. Good money from a good father somewhere back in Grecian Asia could he but win the lad’s trust and get his story true, and save some royal youth from those sharp-taloned hawks of the wine shops.

He bade the little stranger sit down on the bench.

“The wine in the tankard there I drained; but here’s bread and cheese—eat! How does that compare with the bread and cheese of your Lebanon herds?”

The lad ate ravenously. The guard went inside the hut and brought out fresh wine.

“The cheese is not so white as our goat curds; but the bread is like pearls after Rome’s slave fare.”

The old Idumean pricked up his ears. “Slave fare!” Then the boy had been held by some one in Rome. The guard’s caution redoubled, to which he added courtesy.

The spring frogs piped from the marshes. Last snatches of bird notes came from the oleander and acacia groves in front of the villas on the far side of the canal. A cooling breeze came down from the hills where the festive bonfires now winked a flamy eye. Only a few barges glided down the waters of the canal. The traffic of the paved road had quieted to an occasional soldier-tread echoing iron on the stones, or the barefoot patter of a hurrying furtive slave, or the loud laughter of lewd women, and louder disputes of the bargemen in the lodging houses.

“What brought you here?” quietly asked the guard.

“To see the sights of Rome—”

“And I’ll warrant you’ve seen enough of them. Have you seen the gladiators?”

“Their blood sickened me,” answered the lad. “The narrow streets choked me. I could not breathe their yellow air after our Lebanon sunshine. These marshes send up a yellow stench; and the lodging houses stank; and your freedmen loafers are night demons! I’d give all Rome for one night back in Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, or down by the sea at Cæsarea. Your iron-shod hoofs keep me from sleep. I’d give all Nero’s Empire to hear the padded tread of our camels over the turfs where the caravans of Damascus and Chaldea meet!”

The Idumean pondered that. He must, then, be the son of some Damascus or Grecian merchant in Asia. Good money and plenty of it in those iron chests!

“Know you the ‘Camel Song’ of the sand rovers of Arabia?” he asked.

In the starlight he saw tears spring to the long-lashed blue eyes.

Sweet to mine ears are the sounds

Of thy tinkling bells, O my camel!

“And, oh, how the singing sands made melody, my Lord, when the hot winds drove them like sheets of snow!”

“Aye, that they do,” returned the old Idumean, “and I would I were where I could hear them sing instead of cooling my heels in Rome waiting for this crazy Prophet to get his head chopped! Much good that will do!” The old man’s manner warmed to desert memories of his native land.

“I’ll befriend you. You can stay here. The Prophet needs some one to care for him and cook his meals. He’s growing old. His sight is fading fast. I’ve grown tired of nightly sleeping chained to the arm of a prisoner you could not bribe to run away, while the Emperor takes his pleasure and puts off the acquittal of a man Agrippa wrote was innocent, all because his wife plays the convert to Jerusalem Jews to get a revenue for protecting them, and hates this new sect of Jews that call themselves Christians. You could not pay this prisoner to escape, though fewer and fewer friends come to see him every day. They know the Empress is their enemy and may work Nero to some fresh madness any day. If it were not I value my own head, I’d sometimes believe him myself; but no head of mine for these mad zealots! It takes the iron hand of a Herod to beat out the flame of their sedition, and not the gentle pleading of young Agrippa to bring them to their senses! When the Prophet gets his pardon, if he is wise he’ll haste to Spain and never set foot in Rome or Jerusalem again.”

A second draft of wine—for the mountain lad had not touched the fresh tankard—had loosened the old soldier’s tongue. “I mind when I served Herod’s son as a lad like you at Cæsarea and won my freedom in the great gladiatorial combat in the theater, where the sands swam in blood to the knees, with Agrippa the Great sitting clad in his mail of silver, before the owl flew over and brought him ill-omens so that he fell down dead—”

“What?” interrupted the boy—“were you once a slave, too, my Lord Julius?”

“Too,” noted the old Idumean. The softened manner hardened. Was he a slave after all? “What did the harpies of the wine shops want of you? A lad clad in Damascus silks would not touch these sows of Rome’s gutters.”

The boy answered eagerly. “They said the Emperor would pass in his chariot to-night; and the Empress Poppæa was to go down to the sea in her ivory barge. They meant to strip me, throw me in the water, rescue me, and offer me for sale as her barge passed—”

The old guard laughed so harshly that all his ivory teeth gleamed ugly as a boar’s tusks. “And I’ll warrant if ever she saw your milk-white mountain skin stripped, they would have made the sale at three times a slave’s price. There is more in this—there is more in this. Why did you leave your mountains of Lebanon?”

“I did not,” hotly protested the baited boy, becoming frightened at the changed manner of the Idumean. “When Felix cleared the robbers out of Galilee, I was held for ransom in their caves. They said we mountaineers were robbers. We never were. We are shepherds; but I was caught in my father’s caravan. He was the great sheik of the road from Damascus to the East; and Felix gave me to young Agrippa for a toy, a plaything. I was a page to the Princess Bernice when your prisoner Prophet in there made his plea before Agrippa the Young to come to Rome and prove his case; but when the Princess Bernice was sent to Cilicia to marry that old man there, and still the evil tongues about her and her brother—”

The boy paused in confusion, blushing red as a girl. The Idumean grasped his wrist. “Go on—the truth—or I’ll have you torn limb from limb by the tigers in the arena. What of that night monster, Bernice, with the snaky Herod blood in her veins?”

The boy cried out with the pain of the viselike grasp. “The Princess bade me not to fear to come to Rome, where she would come when she had shaved her head and paid a vow in Jerusalem—”

“Where she is now, and all Rome laughing at the pretext,” the old Idumean loosened his grasp. “Where she is now, to slip her old husband and throw her net over Titus, our General Vespasian’s son. I’ll warrant it will be a net of air she’ll weave; the spider maid will throw her wiles on the next poor fly! Did the King Agrippa’s sister send you to Rome? Have a care how you answer that!”

“No, my Lord Julius, the King, her brother Agrippa, handed me to a Grecian merchant in Colossé; but with the gold his sister gave me I ran away and took ship to Rome from Crete.”

A curious, terrible crafty change had come over the guard. No wild boar of the desert was he now, but crafty hunter stalking human prey in Rome’s underworld. “Young one—I have no love for these seditious Judeans; but I’ll befriend you because I have given you a Roman’s pledge. Here’s my right hand as pledge no Roman ever broke. Had I lost my prisoners it would have cost my head; but when you go into the Prophet there, see you do not bleat like one of your long-eared mountain goats! Blastus, Herod’s old chamberlain, is friend of his; so is Manæn, Herod’s foster-brother, and Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward! Keep yourself out of sight in the inner room when strangers call; for some of Cæsar’s household also come here, whether to spy or believe, how do I know? But how did the knaves and body snatchers of the Three Taverns snare you?”

“I was coming out to seek the young scribe Timothy—I saw him once and helped him carry the Prophet in, when he was mobbed and stoned and left for dead in Lystra—I thought he’d help me back to my people!”

The Idumean rose impatiently.

“That spider maid! The vixen with Herod’s snaky blood! Go inside! I’ll lock the door! Prepare the Prophet his supper. I’ll to the Three Taverns to ferret this. Remember if you try to run away—there is no escape from Roman power in all the known world from Gaul to the Ganges; but I see one rich way of escape to fortune for you, and money for me to make me rich, if Bernice ever cast her eyes at you—might save young Titus, son of our General, falling a victim to her wiles! Go in, I say, and keep your tongue from blabbing—or I’ll cut it out with my dagger! Princess Bernice! Titus’ mistress! By Jupiter, ’tis my lucky day at last and I’ll make offerings to Fortune,” he muttered, striding off.

The heart of the frightened boy almost stopped. He seemed to have jumped from danger close to death or torture. What had he told, or not told, that made him, a friendless Grecian boy in Imperial Rome, of great money value to the Idumean guard the minute Bernice’s name was mentioned? Why had the rough soldier called the young princess a “night monster,” “a spider maid,” “a vixen with snaky blood,” “a nymph” aiming a net at Titus, the son of the Roman General in Asia? Why should a girl princess not flee one old husband, married to silence evil tongues, and seek a younger mate in the General’s son? Wise, wise as seer or prophet is the intuition of youth; but stronger than the breastplate of Imperial Rome the innocence of youth; for the boy had not told all the truth. Something he held back for the love of the royal mistress, who had befriended him. He had not told the Idumean captain that when he had been handed over to the merchant of Colossé he had been sold by King Agrippa because his young master was jealous of his sister’s affections for a page; and when he had taken ship at Crete, dressed as a page, he was a runaway slave, with Princess Bernice’s gold in a goatskin wallet round his girdle, obeying her orders “to have no fear to go to Rome; she would meet him there: to wait.”

To his youthful heart it seemed no evil thing that she should come to Rome and marry Titus, Vespasian’s son, where he again could be her page. He could not know that all Rome was now counting on General Vespasian to save the Empire and become Emperor. He would not have had long to wait, as destiny soon rolled the years to Vespasian’s triumphial entry into Rome—if the harpy women of the wine shops on the water front had not taken note of his beauty and set the bargemen on to kidnap him as bait for higher game in Nero’s Palace, where ruled an evil woman, guided only by her own wicked desires.

The boy heard the door clank as the Prætorian guard drew the chain across outside and snapped the great twin locks with a key as long as a man’s forearm. He heard the ring of the swift soldier tread as the Idumean strode over the stones for the Three Taverns.

Then he turned. The room was dark but for a flickering peat fire on the hearth and a little guttering olive oil wick in a stone or breccia lamp on a rough board table. The floor was softened with sand and earth. The window was high and latticed, but let a soft breeze in from the sea. A little, stooped old man with a white beard and snow white hair and skullcap such as doctors of the law wore, sat on a backless stool at the table, writing on a scroll which he unwound from a roller as he wrote, with his eyes so close to the papyrus that he did not see the boy’s form against the dark of the door.

Except for the table and the backless stool there was no furniture in the prison hut but two couches, close together near the door; and the boy noticed that while the prisoner’s right hand wrote and wrote on unheeding, his left arm, resting on the table, had a huge handcuff attached to an iron chain which also lay on the table; and this was the Prophet, whom he had helped the scribe Timothy carry in stoned for dead at Lystra. This was the man, when the wreck broke up at Malta, who stood in the pelting rain and the dark and bade the Lord Julius “be of good cheer” and thanked his strange God “that now at last he could publish the Glad News at Rome.”

The boy had not noticed the strange leader of the strange new sect in the Judgment Hall at Cæsarea, because he had been too young, the toy and plaything of the youthful King Agrippa and his younger sister, Bernice, and he had noticed him still less at Lystra, some years before, because he had been still younger and much too excited over the mob. There is a discrepancy here in the boy’s story as picked out of the old records; and yet the discrepancy proves its truth, for he could not have been more than four or five. Yet he distinctly remembered coming in on one of his father’s caravans for Damascus from the South, and seeing the maddened mob, and running with all the camel drivers toward the gates of the city, where he had picked up the insensible Prophet’s cap and helped the young scribe Timothy to shuffle the almost lifeless form through the doors into the house of Lois and Eunice, Timothy’s people, who were Greek merchants.

On the ship wrecked between Crete and Malta, he recalled the prisoner of two years ago well enough; but he had kept himself out of sight from both prisoners and sailors all he could on that voyage, staying below deck on plea of seasickness by day and coming up only in the wild nights, when the high-rolling cape of his black cloak had hidden his face; and he could dream his dreams of awakening youth, and the message of hope his Princess’s black glance had thrown him when she slipped him the wallet of gold pieces from her litter chair and bade him “haste to Rome and wait there.”

Yet it had been no easy business for him “to haste to Rome,” for the merchant of Colossé to whom Agrippa in a moment of jealous suspicion had sold him had been an exacting master, and had set the new young slave to keeping accounts in the great warerooms. It had only been his knowledge of the Phrygian patois dialect, half Assyrian, half Greek, that had induced the merchant to send him to the seacoast and the Isles of the Sea to collect exchange on accounts. He had collected the accounts. Then he had taken ship at Crete and run away without a qualm. Why should he have qualms? Had he not been kidnapped by the robbers of Galilee and held for ransom, and, when the robbers were routed out by Felix, given as a slave—he, who came from the mountaineers who never had been slaves—to young King Agrippa and the sister, Bernice?

After that, life had become a golden dream of awakening youth. Though Bernice had been a wife to one Herod, and now was sent north to be wife to another old man, after the custom of the Herods to strengthen their thrones by marrying their daughters to powerful rulers, Bernice had been almost as young as he—she was barely twenty. He had been set at first to seeing that the Nubian slaves kept the royal baths at Cæsarea clean. Then in a fit of suspicion over having any but black eunuchs, who were mutes, attend the royal baths, Agrippa had sent him to keep the tracks of the chariot races powdered with soft sand to fill the wheel ruts and save the horses’ knees if a racer slipped on the swift course.

There he had gained the first glimpse of the Princess’s favor toward himself. She had been driving with her royal young brother in one of the trials for the chariot races. The snowy steeds of the young King’s chariot were given precedence of all others, the Festus’s wild Arab horses were champing the bits to pass, and the Roman had great ado to hold them behind Agrippa. A dozen other prancing teams were surging behind. She had worn a silver bangle round her brow to hold back her hair. On her brow hung a jade-stone ornament from Arabia with the swastika cross of luck beaded in gold. In the wild charge of the racers the jade pendant had bounced from its setting in the sand. Leaping in front of the other racers, the boy had rescued the emblem of good luck from trampling; and all the people in the seats of the great hippodrome had cheered his pluck. Fortune had come to him in the little jewel with the odd cross.

When the charioteers came round the course again, King Agrippa himself had stooped to receive the restored jewel; and the people had cheered again; and when Agrippa and Bernice had gone up to Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, for the wild, lawless pleasures there, then had followed another golden dream of awakening youth. The boy did not know, when he had been with the royal lovers in Daphne’s Gardens, that only a few miles away was the Prophet, with the Christians of Antioch; and here they were, both thrown together in the evil snares of Rome.^[1] Amid the roses and the palms and the love temples and the fountains of the gardens were artificial lakes, where plied boats with silken awnings rowed by Naiads in silver-and-golden nets to the music of zither and harp under the Moon Goddess.

[1]

This is the only point in the boy’s story where there is any discrepancy between his experiences as told by himself and the sacred and profane writers of the period. It does not appear among the sacred writers whether the corn ships carrying the Prophet at the various ports of call delayed long enough for the prisoners to have gone in to Antioch, as they did at all the other ports where Christians dwelt; but in the profane writers of Rome and Greece at the period ’61 A.D. to ’68 A.D., are abundant proofs of all the youth’s adventures in Daphne’s Gardens; and Bernice’s record became an infamy in Rome.

Here Agrippa and Bernice took their pleasure, and he, now the trusted page, accompanied them, as steersman for the nymphs. He was clad in silvered silks, the girl rowers in spangled nets, with naked limbs the color of pink shells. He knew that five hundred bastinadoes on the soles of his feet would be the punishment if ever he breathed a word of what he saw on these nights; and he saw nothing; but dipped his steersman paddle to the rhythm of the temple music, and watched the limpid water ripple in drops of moonlit gold, and dreamed his dreams of awakening youth, which are wiser than seers in their intuitions and stronger than breastplates of bronze in their innocence. He knew nothing going on around him because he saw nothing but Bernice’s eyes; and she was so far beyond his reach, he saw no spider net in those black, fathomless eyes.

And then one day crashed down his house of dreams in catastrophe about his youth. It had been a wild day of painted barges, of soothsayers, of magicians, of story-tellers, of dwarfs, of buffoons, of libations to Bacchus, and temple nymphs clad in golden gauze. The flesh of grown man did not live that could pass that day unscathed; and the page, who had been a mountain boy, knew naught of a goddess who could turn men to swine. There had been an older man with King Agrippa and his sister that day. The boy remembered afterward the older man had the face of one of the satyrs, half man, half goat, of whom his mountain tribes told.

There had been frenzied dancing in the love temples and more libations to Bacchus; but the mountaineers do not drink; and at the end of that day, to quiet evil tongues, Princess Bernice had been affianced to the King with the satyr face; and the star of the boy’s lamp had gone out in utter blackness, with his heart cold lead, till, passing from the love temple in her curtained, latticed litter, she had thrust out her hand to him in the dark and given him the purse of gold and bade him haste to Rome and meet her there, while she went to Jerusalem to pay a vow! He did not know the nature of that vow, though all the fashion of Rome was laughing over it, and poets made mock of it and actors in the theaters extemporized lines on “Bernice’s locks” and do to this day.

He knew with the knowledge of youth she had shaved her head and taken her vow to escape her elderly spouse; and now the rough Idumean guard had said all Rome was laughing at the way the sly maid had gone to Jerusalem but to throw her nymph net over Titus, son of Vespasian, who might become Emperor after Nero.

And now he stood in the prison hut of Rome, with the wolf harpies of the water-front wine shops outside, locked in by the Roman soldier, who knew there was fortune to be grasped by restoring a slave, with the threat ringing in his ears—“There is no escape from Roman power in all the known world; keep your tongue from blabbing—or I’ll cut it out with my dagger,” and the Lebanon boy had seen captives whose tongues had been cut by daggers. He knew this was no idle threat; but he did not know it was his boyish beauty that had cast the fatal net of danger round himself.

The boy stood with his head hanging, behind the locked door of the prison hut, like a fly caught in an evil spider web. He did not ascribe the net flung round him by dark eyes seen through the lattice of a palanquin to any spider maid; for he was still thinking with the knowledge of youth rather than age. He only knew the spider net had become strong chains binding him to the evil forces of the great Imperial City of the world, and that he had been flung into that net by a destiny uncontrolled by him except for the one act—when he had run away from his merchant master at Colossé.

He was too deeply sunk in sudden despond and fear to notice the flickering of the shadows from the lifted breccia-stone lamp held in the Prophet’s hand, while the other hand shaded the old man’s defective vision peering at the ragged figure against the back of the locked door. All hope had flickered out for him with the turning of the double lock by that great key the Idumean carried.

A voice spoke out of the dark, quiet, clear, and limpid as his own mountain streams in Lebanon: “Child, come here! Why are you troubled?”

The boy raised his long-lashed blue eyes and looked across to see, not the little withered wisp of a man he had remembered as the Prophet, but a snow-white face illumined in an ethereal light and framed in an aureole of snow white hair.

“The Lord Julius bade me prepare your supper.”

The Prophet did not press his question. “There are the corn bread and the leben in the alcove,” he said, pointing to a dark corner of the stone wall, “and in one jar you will find the drinking water and in the other the fresh pulse.”

The boy laid the meal on the rough table without a word and took his stand behind the Prophet’s stool. He was still dust spattered and torn from his fall.

“Bring the couch to the table,” requested the Prophet.

Thinking the Master wished to eat reclining, after the manner of the Judeans, the boy lifted the couch and placed it at the table.

“Join me,” gently urged the Prophet. “I remember when I was a lad in Tarsus before I went down to study law in Jerusalem, we used to say of the mountain men, when they had broken bread and salt with us, they would be our friends forever, and never utter word, or think thought against host or guest. A good rule, child.”

Tears sprang to the lad’s eyes; for what the Prophet had said was true, and recalled all the stern tradition of the mountain tribes, who dwelt in tents and roved the desert on camels.

“Let us bless God and give thanks,” said the Master, bowing his head; and the boy understood neither the strange Deity to whom thanks were given nor what there was for thanks in a prison hut.

It must have been the white hair or the white beard; for though the wick was guttering lower in the breccia lamp, that luminous look seemed to shine brighter and brighter round the figure of the Prophet. The boy could see his hands like hands of snow in the gathering dusk of the hut; and his brow shone with the radiance of the sun’s white flame at dawn.

“Why did you wish to see Timothy?” he asked, as though reading the lad’s thought.

Thereat, the youth’s pent emotions of terror and despondency and fearful unknown danger broke in floods of speech.

“And, oh, Master,” cried the boy, finishing the narrative that the Idumean had forbidden him to tell, and holding back nothing but his love for the Princess, “my Lord Julius says there is no escape from the power of Rome from Gaul to the Ganges for a slave. Let me be your slave, oh, Master! Master, buy me and save me! I’ll serve you as never Emperor was served in thought and speech and act! I’ll serve you forever with no brand on my palms or shoulders.” And the little mountaineer, who never yet had bowed his head to earth as slave, fell at the old man’s knees sobbing, and would have placed the Prophet’s foot on his neck.

“What was your merchant master’s name in Colossé?”

“The Lord Philemon; and oh, my Master, I’ll pay him back my price and all the money I stole to run away to Rome. I’ll work my hands to the bone! I’ll earn wages for my price by acting as runner between the poles for the great Romans in the villas here. I’ll pay him back fourfold as the law demands. Only let me stay—keep me from the wolves of Rome—keep the Lord Julius from selling me to Nero’s Palace, or tearing out my tongue for telling you, or flogging me five hundred bastinadoes on my feet for running away, or betraying me for telling of Bernice’s kindness. I know now what I should or should not tell, nor why—”

“Ah, those crafty foxes of the Herod brood! ’Twas what Christ called them when they slew John for Salome’s dance. She was of the same brood of vipers long ago; and the blood of a Herod runs true to color.”

The Prophet’s hands were over his eyes and he seemed to be thinking back long, long years. The hearth fire guttered lower. The lamp wick had burned almost to the edge of the oil, and still the Prophet’s face shone with luminous radiance as of an inner white flame; and his hands looked like ethereal hands through which flamed an inner fire of the spirit in kindly deeds.

“Dear Master, let me be your slave—”

“Child, there are nor bond nor free in the Great Kingdom which I serve; for neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”

“Nor bond nor free?” cried the little mountaineer. “Is there a kingdom in all the world where there are neither bond nor free?”

“The Kingdom is here and now,” said the Prophet; and his brow shone with the radiance of moonlight on the snowy peaks of Lebanon.

“But, sir,” cried the boy, “they held me slave, and they hold you in bonds; for the King Agrippa told the Lord Julius—”

“Two bodies there are,” answered the Prophet gently, “one terrestrial and one celestial—one that waxes old as a garment which we cast aside, and one that grows younger with fuller life as the years nearer draw to God; and neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any other creature than ourselves can place bonds upon that body. Like the air, which we do not see, but in which we live and move and have our being, that celestial body lives and moves and has its being in the love of God. Child, rejoice, rejoice, again I say rejoice, that the Glad News has come and the Kingdom is here—and now.”

When the Idumean returned, his mood seemed again gentler. He bade the boy fasten the wrist gyves of the chain on the prisoner’s left arm to his own right wrist, and to sleep on the floor, so that he as older man would not be troubled in his sleep by the clank of the chain when he tossed restlessly at night, as age is wont to do.

And when the boy wakened in the morning with the day-star shining through the lattice of the high window, he found his new Master had thrown over him, against the dank chill of the marshes at night, his own black gabardine doctor’s cloak of Damascus velvet. While the Idumean and the prisoner, chained up again at sunrise, took the air in parade before the barracks of the Prætorian Guard, the youth swept out the hut floor with a broom of brush and laid the breakfast on the rough board table. Then the bonds were unlocked from the guard’s arms and the prisoner sat down to write letters, or receive visitors, and the old Idumean again posted himself on the stone bench in front of the hut.

When the lad came out, the Idumean bade him sit down on the bench to talk. “The prisoner says he has arranged to take you for—by Jupiter—he wouldn’t call you ‘slave’—a queer lot these followers of Christus—he said he’d take you for his helper—he’d known your merchant master as a friend in Colossé and would take you for a pledge of what that merchant owed him. That’s good Roman law. You’re safe enough now. He said your new name must be Onesimus—the Helpful One.”

“Why, that—is my very own name. How could he know?”

The Prætorian guard smiled. “He knows queer things in queer ways, this prisoner. Rome is full of magicians and sorcerers and soothsayers, mostly Greeks and Jews; but I never knew one could tell what he foretold about the storm, nor hold from mutiny two hundred and seventy prisoners swimming for freedom unchained in the open sea. What puzzles me is, when he has this power, why doesn’t he use it to get himself his freedom instead of wasting two full years here babbling of the Glad News—Glad News—Glad News? News, indeed, ’twill be if Nero places all his tribe in the arena to feed the wild beasts! Why doesn’t he use his power to build himself a fortune, and buy a kingdom as Herod did, and rule all Jewry? Then I’ll follow him myself; for Rome is breaking up.”

“What does he say when you ask him that?”

“Oh, folly about a Kingdom not made with hands; a Kingdom of the soul. What’s a soul to Roman legions? Sometimes, like Festus, I incline to think much learning hath made him mad—”

“I remember the very words—the very words he said at Cæsarea the day I saved the jewel on the chariot course for Princess Bernice; and King Agrippa said ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian’—you know the way King Agrippa has, pretending to agree, to draw the adversary on—”

“And what said our Prophet to that?”

“He smiled that gentle, fearless way of his and said—‘I would thou wert such as I am’; and all his prison chains rattled to the floor as he threw up his arm when he said that; and the great ones on the judgment seat broke out in laughter. King Agrippa laughed the merriest of all; and the Princess whispered ‘The gods forbid.’ What does he teach? What does he believe, Lord Julius?”

“How do I know?” answered the Idumean roughly. “It’s always Glad News—Glad News—Glad News; Rejoice—Rejoice—Rejoice! By Jupiter, what have the Jews had to rejoice about for a thousand years, till Rome came and gave them good roads and theaters and forums and aqueducts, and held the fierce sand rovers back, plundering their very Holy Temple with its golden doors? I mind once hearing the soldiers talk of an Egyptian, I think it was, who plundered their precious Temple before Herod rebuilt it; and when he entered into their Holy of Holies, where never man trod, and their own priests opened only once a year to take the gold angels above the Altar, there wasn’t even the image of a little gold god—not a thing in brass or silver like a god—only a queer blue cloud like a flame from some of their magic fires—”

“A queer blue cloud like a flame?” repeated the boy. “Why, that’s the way his face and hands look in the dark. What does he teach?”

“Listen when his visitors come, and you’ll learn soon enough if you can make anything of their Greek doctrine and Jewish jargon—I can’t. I’m Idumean—Roman—I believe in pikes and swords—in law and gold. One day it’s ‘don’t be insipid’—‘don’t lose your salt’—‘never assume gloomy looks’—‘don’t throw pearls to swine’—‘away with fear’—‘laugh at the sting of death’—‘lead justice to victory’; or else he tells these Jews of Rome they are ‘fatheads and dullwits and grosshearts,’ with which we Romans agree; or else ‘the earth is an inn and death the eternal house to which he has the key to another house of many mansions,’ or he quotes that old Job legend of the Arabs, about ‘flesh renewed as a little child’s’; but you should hear him when the young Timothy comes— ‘It’s Timothy, son, beware the young widows.’ That’s what I call sense.

“It would be good advice to you next time a princess with black eyes casts her net at a simpleton! He calls his Christus a Lamb of sacrifice for sin. That’s queer; for I remember nearly forty years ago, when I was your age, I helped to crucify that Christus. Still it’s not so different from the Sacred Bull of Egypt by which the priests get revenue, or the Sacred Lion of Chaldea, or Jupiter of our Sun Temples. Our kings all get revenue by some religious trick hitched up to fear of some god—sun or star or love of war! As I tell you, I’m a plain soldier. I can make nothing of it. I’m for the power of Rome, the law of Rome, the wealth of Rome; there is no power on earth can stand up against it.”

The boy sat pondering. He couldn’t forget that little blue flame above the desecrated Altar of the plundered Temple, like the radiance of the Prophet’s brow in the dark. Perhaps all eyes could not see that flame. Perhaps that was what had blinded the Prophet. He’d ask him about that.

And so the summer ran to winter and the winter to spring again, when the emptied corn ships went back to Greece and Egypt, laden with tin from Britain and hides from Gaul and copper from Spain.

The boy saw and pondered much. He was known now among the Jews of Rome as the adopted son of the prisoner. What passed between the boy and the Prophet, only God knows. They were as loving father and more loving son. The Prophet was restless when the boy was out of his sight; and the boy’s eyes followed his master with the mute love of a child for a saint. But fewer and fewer converts came to see the Prophet; for Nero’s mood was darkening toward the new sect; and the believers were scattering to the hills and to the Isles of the Sea before the storm broke.

Only the gentle Greek physician called Luke kept coming; and one Mark, a deacon, who talked much of a great leader, Peter; and the young scribe, Timothy, grown more ethereal and frail as he added years, and a great one, called Epaphroditus, who was friend of many great ones, but led no sect for fear of his head. Once Epaphroditus came with a learned Jewish scholar called Josephus, whose records may be read to this day.

And he and the Prophet talked long and bitterly of the law, of the Roman rulers and armies in Judea. Like Epaphroditus, Josephus openly joined no sect that was cold or indifferent to Rome; but his beliefs may be read between the lines of all he wrote.

And once there came with Epaphroditus a strange huge man clad all in white from Alexandria, followed by a caravan of camels that Roman rumor said had traversed all the world. His name was Apollos; and he joined the learning of the Persians to the learning of the Greeks; and had prophesied all that the prisoner told; and his sayings, too, may be found to this day both among the Egyptians and the Persians. The Prophet and the huge man in white embraced like brothers; and all Rome went mad with the sensations of a day over what they called the Magian. Rome was more mad over his caravan of camels than about his doctrines.

Once the boy turned to his beloved patron: “Master,” he said, “when you have power to save me, why do you not use your power to save yourself and flee from the dangers of Rome?”

“Because he that saveth his life shall lose it.”

And that night, when he was writing a letter to Timothy, who was in Greece, to come to Rome, the boy heard the Prophet dictate the words, “I have fought a good fight—I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.” Why, the boy wondered, does he say he has finished his course?

When Timothy came to Rome, the boy went in to his patron.

Again, the frogs were piping in the marshes. It was a fair evening in spring. Again, the oleander and the acacia and the almond and the apricot bloom drugged the night with dreams. Again, the sun hung over the far sea in a warrior shield, and the dust from the chariot wheels filtered the air with powdered gold. Again the Spring Festival was over and all Rome seemed out-of-doors, afoot, on barge, on horseback, or in chariot, either going home to the hill towns of the poor, or down to the rich villas by the sea. Again, the bonfires burned on the hillsides with flamy eye, and gold-wheeled chariots flashed over the canal road in a smoke of dust. Again, the bargemen and sailors and slave rowers up from the corn ships of Egypt on Naples Bay made the night ring with knavish revels in the water-front wine shops; but though the sun sank as golden on the waters and the stars came out as silver over the hills, the canal was no longer the happy thoroughfare of gay throngs in spring under colored silk awnings with Nubian slaves on the rowers’ ivory benches; for a mute fear was settling over Rome as to what madness Nero would next pursue; and the great senators and generals no longer thronged to Rome. They had moved their families to their hillside estates and villas by the sea. The army and the loafers and the idle freedmen and the slaves openly ruled Rome. Nero could hold the loafers and the idle freedmen and the slaves with gifts of free corn and wild Bacchanalian festivals and gladiatorial combats and the baiting of captives taken in war by wild beasts, but all Rome was asking who was strong enough to rule the vast Imperial Army. What would Vespasian, busy in the wars of Palestine, do when he came? What would Titus, over whom Bernice was casting her spider net, do?

A pall rested over the gayly colored spring scenes of Rome. It was as if Vesuvius rumbled and darkened long before the lava-flow buried the beautiful villas in lakes of rock and fire.

So when Onesimus, the helper, had asked the prisoner Prophet why he did not save himself by escaping from Rome, and had pondered that answer about those who save life losing life, and those losing life saving it, he came back in this spring evening and stood timidly before the Prophet.

“My beloved Master, now that you have Timothy with you to write your letters and the physician Luke to care for our body, would you miss me if I went back to Colossé?”

“I would miss you as I would a beloved son begotten of mine own flesh,” said the prisoner gently. “Have you not cast out fear of all that man can do unto you? Why do you wish to go to Colossé instead of carrying the glad tidings to your mountain people?”

“O Master,” Onesimus had fallen to his knees, with his face in the Prophet’s hands, which he bathed in tears. “I fear not what all Rome can do unto me; for I have joined that Kingdom not made with hands; but I fear only the reproach of a good conscience and of my Lord of the Glad Kingdom. I have saved enough of my earnings to pay back the merchant Philemon fourfold the money I stole from him.^[2] He bought me from King Agrippa for a price. I would go back, his slave, till your King gives me my freedom.”

[2]	The value of a slave at this time was about eighteen dollars of modern money, though much more was paid for beautiful girl captives and young men who gave promise of becoming gladiators.

The Prophet’s hands lifted and rested on the boy’s hair. In the dark they shone with the luminous light of the stars on snow. His lips were moving—the boy heard him whisper— “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; the Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

That evening the Idumean of the Prætorian guards remained down at the water front among the wine shops, and the Prophet wrote far into the night. Onesimus would have written for him, for the prisoner’s eyes had grown dimmer; but the Master said it was better this letter should be written privately; and he wrote it on a wax tablet with an onyx stylus to guide his failing sight. When he had finished he put the tablet in a parchment case sealed with wax and bade the boy give it to the merchant Philemon of Colossé. Then he embraced Onesimus and sent him to board the barges that would go down the canal to the corn ships setting sail at daybreak for Grecian Asia.

Here briefly is what he wrote. You will find it exactly and fully as he wrote it in the oldest record of documentary history in the world—the most widely circulated documents in the modern world and probably the least thoroughly read of all books in the world. Space permits only the briefest outline of the letter, the original of which any reader can compare in any language known in the world. Some few phrases differ according to the language, but the purport is the same in all; and the story is meticulously true in every essential, though scholars and schools still quarrel over some dates and two or three names. As far as it is possible to figure these early dates, this letter was written between 62 and 64 A.D.

“... to Philemon, our beloved and fellow worker, and to Apphia, our gracious lady ... I had great joy and comfort in your love, because the hearts of God’s people have been and are, refreshed through you, my brother.... Therefore, though I speak very freely, it is for love’s sake I rather beg of you ... I, the aged and prisoner ... write to entreat you on behalf of a child, whose father I have become in my chains ... I mean Onesimus, who was a bad bargain to you, but now, true to his name, has become a helpful one to us both.

“I am sending him back to you in his person, and it is as if I sent my own very heart ... I wished to keep him with me that he might minister to me in my old age and chains, but without your consent I would not; for I wanted it of your free will. Receive him back no longer as a slave, but as brother, dear to me, beloved, as a fellow worker for Christ. If you still regard me as comrade, receive him as myself. If he was ever dishonest, or is in your debt, charge me with the amount. Hold me responsible for the debt on your books. I pledge my signature. I will pay you in full. (I say nothing of the fact you owe me yourself the same amount.)

“Yes, beloved, do me this favor for our Lord’s sake. Refresh my joy in Christ. I write you in full confidence. I know you will do more than I say, and provide accommodation for me; for I hope through your prayers I shall be free to come. Greetings from my fellow prisoners, among whom are Mark and Luke. May the graciousness of Christ be in the innermost soul of every one of you....”

And though they put the signatures to the letters first in those days, which was a better thing than our custom of having to read through a letter to know who wrote it, the name signed to that letter by a half-blind little old man, ill, and so near death (Nero’s blade was already whetted for the sacrifice), with a chain on his arm in a prison hut, was

“PAUL.”