Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

by Elizabeth Miller

CHAPTER V

AGRIPPA IN REPERTOIRE

On the way two dark figures emerged from the shadows and halted to let the soldiers pass. Agrippa peered at them intently through the gloom, and raising his arm made a peculiar gesture. Both figures approached immediately.

"Do thou fetch my civilian's dress, Silas, to the gate of the Prætorium to-morrow, early, and my umber toga broidered with silver. And thou, Eutychus, prepare our belongings so thou canst carry them and bring them also that we may proceed at once to En-Gadi. I remain at the Prætorium to-night. Be gone and fail not!"

The two men bowed and disappeared.

When the party reëntered the gates of the camp, Herod's vestibule was dark. The prisoner and Agrippa were led to the barracks and turned into a cubiculum, or sleeping-chamber. One of the four was manacled to Marsyas and the bolts shot upon them.

The soldier immediately stretched himself on the straw and, bidding the others hold their peace, fell asleep promptly.

After a long time, when the sounds from the pallet assured Agrippa that the soldier could not be easily aroused, he arose and came over to the side of the young Essene.

The torch-light for the officer of the guard, flaring on the wall without, shone through the high ventilation niche in the cell and cast a faint illumination over the dusky interior. Under the half-light the face of Marsyas looked fallen and lifeless,—his dark hair in disorder on his forehead, his shadowed eyes and slight black beard making for the increase of pallor by contrast. Agrippa looked at him a moment before the young man had noticed his approach.

"The medicine for thy hurts, young brother," he said to himself, "is only one—the comforting arms of a woman. I have had experience; I know! But if thou art an Essene that comfort is denied thee. Now, I wonder what demon-ridden Jew it was who first thought of an order of celibates!"

He drew closer and the somber eyes of the young man lighted upon him.

"So thou dost not sleep," Agrippa said in Hebrew. Marsyas' face showed a little surprise at the choice of tongue, but he answered in the same language.

"Why am I here?" he asked.

"Better here than there," Agrippa responded under his breath, indicating the direction of Jonathan's stronghold.

"Listen," he continued, "and may Morpheus plug this soldier's ears if he knows our fathers' ancient tongue. Canst see my face, brother?"

Marsyas signed his assent.

"Thou sayest thou art a Galilean," Agrippa pursued. "Look now and see if thou discoverest aught familiar in me."

Marsyas raised himself on an elbow and gazed into the Herod's face. Finally he said slowly:

"I have seen thee in Tiberias—in power—as—as prefect! Thou art Herod Agrippa!"

There was silence; the Essene's eyes filled with question and the Herod gave him time to think.

"I had thee arrested," Agrippa resumed when he believed that Marsyas' ideas had reached the point of asking what the Herod had to do with him. "To-morrow thou wilt be fined for striking me and turned loose—to Jonathan—unless thou art helped to escape."

"I understand," said Marsyas with growing light, but without enthusiasm.

"Thou seest I am virtually a prisoner here. I became so, to save thee from Jonathan."

"For me! Thou becamest a prisoner to save me?" Marsyas repeated, astounded.

"Because I need thee as much as thou needest me," was the frank admission.

"What can I do for thee that thou shouldst need me?" Marsyas asked softly, but still wondering.

"Hast—hast thou ever lacked friends so wholly that thou wast willing to purchase one?" Agrippa asked.

"I am thy grateful servant; yet I am an Essene, poor, persecuted, homeless, hungry and heartbroken. What wilt thou have of me?"

In that was more earnestness than blandishment, more appeal than offering. The young man published his helplessness and asked after the other's use of him. Agrippa was silent; after a pause Marsyas put out his hand and lifting the hem of the pagan tunic pressed it to his lips. The act could not fail to reach to the innermost of the Herod's heart. His head dropped suddenly into his hands, and the young Essene's touch rested lightly on his shoulder.

Finally Agrippa raised his head.

"Dost thou know my history, brother?" he asked.

"From the lips of others, yes; but let me hear thee."

"Thou art a just youth; nothing so outrages a slandered man as to pen his defense within his lips. Hear me, then. To be a Herod once meant to be beloved by the Cæsars. In my early childhood, after the death of my young father, I was taken to Rome by my mother and reared among princes and the sons of consuls. Best of all my friends was Drusus, Cæsar's gallant son, and we studied together, raced and gambled and feasted together, loved and hated—and fought together, and never was there a difference between us except in purse!

"While he lived, I lived as he lived, but when he died his sire drove me out of Rome because I had been the living Drusus' shadow and it stung the father that the shadow should live while the sweet substance perished.

"When Drusus died my living died with him, and when I took ship at Puteoli for Palestine I owed three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar and forty tradesmen barked about my heels.

"I had a ruined castle in Idumea. I forgot that I owned it till I was in actual want of shelter. Thither I went. But I was a young man, hopeless, and young hopelessness is harder than the hopelessness of age. I should have put an end to myself, but Cypros, my princess, prevented me by the gentle force of her love and devotion.

"She could not have balked me more thoroughly had she tied me hand and foot. I railed, but while I railed she wrote and sent a messenger, and in a little time an answer came. It was from my brother-in-law, Herod Antipas, who is tetrarch of Galilee. Cypros had besought him to help us. He wrote courteously, or else his scribe, for it is hard to reconcile that letter with the man I met, and begged me come and be his prefect over Tiberias. I went."

The prince paused and when he went on thereafter it seemed as if his account were expurgated.

"At Tyre before an hundred nobles assembled at a feast he twitted me with my poverty and boasted his charity. I tore off the prefect's badge and flung it in his face. And that same night I took the road to Antioch, my princess with me, a babe on either arm.

"The proconsul of Antioch took us in, but there was treachery against me afoot in his household, and I lost his friendship through it. His was my last refuge under roof of mine own rank. I heard recently that Alexander Lysimachus, Alabarch of Alexandria, was in Jerusalem, presenting a Gate to the Temple, and sending my wife and children to Ptolemais, I hastened hither to get a loan of him. But he had departed some days before I came. So here am I as a player of dice to win me money enough to take me back to Ptolemais. But Herrenius Capito, Cæsar's debt-collector, hath found me out."

He looked down at Marsyas' interested face.

"Let me be truthful," he corrected. "I found him. I could have flown him successfully, but for thy close straits. All that would save thee would be the interference of Rome, and I could command it at sacrifice."

Public version of Agrippa's story had enlarged much on certain phases of his adventures which he had curtailed, and these minutiæ had not been to Herod's credit. Yet, though Marsyas knew of these things, his heart stirred with great pity. His was that large nature which turns to the unfortunate whether or not his misfortune be merited. It seemed to him that the prince's fall had been too hapless for comment. But the word here and there, which suggested the prince's intercession in his behalf, stirred him.

"How shall I make back to thee thy effort in my behalf?" he asked earnestly. "Thou sayest that thou needest me; what can I do?"

"First let me know of thyself."

Marsyas relinquished his thought on Agrippa to turn painfully to his own story.

"I am Marsyas, son of Matthew, of Nazareth. He was a zealot who fought beside Judas of Galilee. I was born after his death, and at my birth my mother died, and being the last of their line, I am, and have been all my life alone. I was taken in mine infancy by the Essenic master of the school in Nazareth and reared to be an Essene. But I developed a certain aptness for learning and in later youth a certain aptness for teaching, and my master by the consent of the order, whose ward I was, designed me for the scholar-class of Essenes, which do not reside in En-Gadi but without in the world. The vows of the order were not laid upon me; they are reserved for the sober and understanding years when my instruction should be completed."

Agrippa frowned. "Art thou not a member of the brotherhood, then?" he asked.

"No, I am a neophyte, a postulant."

The Herod ran his fingers though his hair, and Marsyas went on.

"I had two friends, both older than I. One was Saul of Tarsus; one, Stephen of Galilee. Neither knew the other. Stephen was born an Hellenist, and until the coming of his Prophet, a good Jew. But when Jesus arose in Nazareth, Stephen followed Him, and, after the Nazarene was put away, he remained here in Jerusalem. When I came hither to complete mine instruction in the college, I found the synagogue aroused against him.

"Chief among the zealous in behalf of the Law is Saul of Tarsus. Him I most feared, when the rumors of Stephen's apostasy spread abroad. An evil messenger finally set Saul upon Stephen, and I pleaded with him to spare Stephen, until I could win him back to the faith. But Saul would not hear me.

"I meant to give over mine ambition to become a scholar and take Stephen into the refuge of En-Gadi—"

He stopped for control and continued presently with difficulty.

"But when I returned from Nazareth, whither I had gone to get my patrimony which the Essene master held in ward, his enemies stoned him before mine eyes!"

Stephen's death and not his own peril was the climax of his story and he ceased because his heart began to shrink under its pain.

"And this Saul of Tarsus, whom I heard you threaten over in Bezetha, mistaking your natural grief and hunger for vengeance as signs of apostasy, would stone you also," Agrippa remarked, filling in the rest of the narrative from surmise. Marsyas assented; it hurt him as much to think on Saul as it did to remember that Stephen was dead.

"It was doubtless his intent."

"Implacable enough to be Cæsar! And thou art not a member of the Essenic order—only a neophyte. That is disconcerting. Hast thou any influence with the brethren?"

"None whatever."

Perplexity sat dark on the Herod's brow. Marsyas, with his eyes on the prince's face, observed it.

"Can I not help thee?" he asked anxiously.

"I thought once that thou couldst; but thou sayest that thou hast no power with the Essenes. Now, I do not know."

"What is it thou wouldst have had me do?"

"I have said that I owe three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar. Unless I discharge it, under the Roman law I can be required to become the slave of my creditor. That I might secure intercession in thy behalf, I had to promise Capito and Vitellius that thou couldst help me to repay this sum."

"I!" Marsyas cried, sitting up.

The legionary stirred and Agrippa laid a warning finger on his lip. The two sat silent until the sleeper fell again into total unconsciousness.

"Three hundred thousand drachmæ!" Marsyas repeated. "I, to get that!"

"I knew that the Essenic brotherhood have a common treasury and that they are believed to be rich. I thought that thou couldst persuade them to lend me the sum."

Marsyas shook his head. "They are poor, poor! Their fund is not contributed in great bulk, and the little they own must be expended in hospitality and in maintaining themselves. Their treasury would be enriched by the little I bring."

"O Fortune!" Agrippa groaned aloud. "I am undone and so art thou!"

Marsyas lapsed into thought, while the Herod looked at the solid door that stood between him and liberty. He had set the subject aside as profitless and was a little irritated when Marsyas spoke again.

"What hopes hast thou in Alexandria?"

"The alabarch, Alexander Lysimachus, is my friend. He is rich; I could borrow of him."

"Take thou my gold and go thither," Marsyas offered at once.

"It is not so easy as it sounds, for the sound of it is most generous and kindly. How am I to get out of Capito's clutches, here?"

Marsyas gazed straight at Agrippa with the set eyes of one plunged into deep speculation. Then he leaned toward the prince.

"Will this gold in all truth help thee to borrow more in Alexandria?"

"I know it!"

"And then what?"

"To Rome! To imperial favor! To suzerainty over Judea!"

Marsyas laid hold on the prince's arm.

"Thou art a Herod," he said intensely. "Ambition natively should be the very breath of thy nostrils. Yet swear to me that thou wilt aspire—aye, even desperately as thy grandsire! Swear to me that thou wilt not be content to be less than a king!"

At another time, Agrippa might have found amusement in the young man's earnestness, but the cause was now his own.

"Thou tongue of my desires!" he exclaimed. "I have sworn! Being a Herod, mine oaths are not idle. I have sworn!"

"Then, let us bargain together," Marsyas said rapidly. "I have told thee my story: thou heardest my vow to-night! For my fealty, yield me thy word! As I help thee into power, help me to revenge! Promise!"

"Promise! By the beard of Abraham, I will conquer or kill anything thou markest; yield thee my last crust, and carry thee upon my back, so thou help me to Alexandria!"

"Swear it!"

Agrippa raised his right hand and swore.

The legionary roused and growled at the two to be quiet. Marsyas fell back on the straw and lay still. Agrippa made signs and urged for more discussion, but the Essene, masterful in his silence, refused to speak. Presently the Herod lay down and slept from sheer inability to engage his mind to profit otherwise.

A little after dawn the following morning, the Essene and the Herod were conducted into the vestibule of Herod the Great, for a hearing before Vitellius and Herrenius Capito. But Marsyas' offense against a Roman citizen was held in abeyance; it was Agrippa's debt to Cæsar which engaged the attention of the judges.

Vitellius was in a precarious temper and Capito looked as grim as querulous old age may. Agrippa's nonchalance was only a surface air overlaying doubts and no little trepidation. But Marsyas, white and sternly intent, was the most resolute of the four.

Capito stirred in his chair and prepared to speak, but Vitellius cut in with a point-blank demand on the young Essene.

"Dost thou know this man?" he asked, indicating Agrippa.

"I do, lord," Marsyas answered, turning his somber eyes on the legate.

"He owes three hundred thousand drachmæ to Cæsar; he says that thou canst help him pay it; is it so?"

"It is, lord."

Agrippa's eyes were perfectly steady; it would not do to show amazement now.

"How?" was the next demand flung at the Essene.

"I can place him in the way of certain wealth," was the assured reply.

"How?"

"The noble Roman's pardon, but there are certain things an Essene may not divulge."

Agrippa's well-bred brows lifted. Was this evader and collected schemer the innocent Essene he had met on the slopes of Olivet the previous evening?

"Answer! Dost thou promise to provide the Herod with three hundred thousand drachmæ which shall be paid unto Cæsar's treasury?"

"I promise to place the prince where he will provide himself with three hundred thousand drachmæ. If he pay it not unto Cæsar, the fault shall be his, not mine."

"Will the Essenes do it?"

"It shall be done," Marsyas replied, his composure unshaken by the menace implied in the questioning.

"Capito, what thinkest thou?" Vitellius demanded.

The old collector shuffled his slippered feet, and his antique treble took on an argumentative tone.

"Cæsar wants his money, not a slave; I want the emperor's commendation, not his blame. But let us bind this young Jew to this."

Vitellius motioned to an orderly. "Send hither a notary; and let us take down this Jew's promise. Now, Herod, speak up. There are no rules of an order to bind you. Where shall you get this money?"

"Of two sources," Agrippa declared, unblushing. "From the young man himself and from the Essenes."

"If you had so many moneyers, why have you not paid your debt long ago?"

"I had not the indorsement of this young Essenic doctor to validate my note, O Vitellius," the Herod responded with equanimity.

The two Romans frowned; the clerk finished his transcription.

"Sign!" Vitellius ordered Marsyas threateningly.

Marsyas calmly wrote his name in Greek under the voucher. After him Agrippa signed the document.

"Now, listen," Vitellius began conclusively. "I believe neither of you. But for the fact that Cæsar would be burdened with a useless chattel I should let Capito foreclose upon you, Agrippa. But there is a chance that this rigid youth may be telling the truth; if he is not—" the legate closed his thin lips and let the menace of his hard eyes complete the sentence. Marsyas contemplated him, unmoved, undismayed, no less inflexible and determined.

"The punishment for his offense against you, Agrippa, is remitted. Get you gone. Capito! Follow them!"

Totally undisturbed by this sudden entanglement in a supposedly clear skein, Agrippa waved his hand and smiled.

"Many thanks, Vitellius," he said. "Would I could get my debts paid if only to deserve thy respect once more. But thy hospitality must be a little longer strained. The wolves of Jonathan wait without to lay hands on this young man. He must be passed the gates in disguise. I provided for that last night. Admit my servants, I pray thee."

"Have your way, Herod, and fortune go with you, curse you for a winsome knave," Vitellius growled.

Agrippa laughed, but there was no laughter in his eyes.

The two were led through a second hall instinct with barbaric splendors, to a small apartment where they were presently attended by two servants.

One was a slow, stolid Jew of middle-age, with stubbornness and honesty the chief characteristics of his face. The other would have won more interest from the casual observer. He was young, well-formed, but of uncertain nationality. His head was like a cocoanut set on its smaller end, and covered with thick, stiff, lusterless black hair, cut close and growing in a rounded point on his forehead. One eye was smaller than the other and the lid drooped. The fault might have given him a roguish look but for the ill-natured cut of his mouth. Both wore the brown garments of the serving-class.

When Agrippa and Marsyas stood up from the ministrations of these two, they were fit figures for a procession of patricians on the Palatine Hill. Marsyas' soiled white garments had been put off for a tunic and mantle of fine umber wool, embroidered with silver. A tallith of silk of the same color was bound with a silver cord about his forehead. Agrippa's garments were only a short white tunic of extraordinary fineness belted with woven gold, and a toga of white, edged with purple. But the prince examined Marsyas with an interested eye.

"By Kypris!" he said aloud, "and thou art to entomb thyself in En-Gadi!"

But Marsyas did not understand.

Capito awaited them when they emerged, and announced himself ready to proceed. Procedure was to be an elaborate thing. A squad of soldiery had been detailed as escort, and stood prepared in marching order; the collector's personal array of apparitors was assembled; his baggage sent forth to his pack-horses,—himself, duly arrayed after the fashion of a conventional old Roman afraid of color.

Agrippa placed himself beside the collector with an equanimity that was almost disconcerting. The old man signed his apparitors to proceed and followed with his two virtual prisoners.

Through the envelope of grief and rancor, the grave difficulties of his predicament reached Marsyas. Unless he could be rid of the surveillance of Capito, both he and the Herod were in sore straits. But Agrippa's amiable temper presaged something, and Marsyas merged the new distress with the burden of misery which bowed him.

They passed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber.

It would have been impossible for a scion of that bloody house to pass for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment upon it. Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and his eyes took on the luster of retrospection.

"I remember it," he said in a preoccupied way, "but only as a dream. I went this way when my father and mother fared hence to Rome!"

Capito lagged also, and Marsyas and the men following slackened their steps, until by the time the center of the vast hall was reached they paused as if by one accord.

The hall was an octagonal, faced half its height, or to the floor of its galleries, in banded agate from the Indies; from that point upward the lining was marble panels and frescoes, alternating. The galleries were supported by a series of interlaced oriental arches, rich with tracery and filigree. With these main features as groundwork, the barbaric fancy of Herod the Great threw off all restraint and reveled in magnitude, richness and display. He did not permit Greece, the arbiter elegantarium, to govern his building or his garnishment. He harkened to the Arab in him and made a bacchanal of color; he remembered his one-time poverty and debased the hauteur of gold to the humility of wood and clay and stone. He imaged Life in all its forms and crowded it into mosaics on his pavement, subjected it in the decoration of his scented wood couches, tables, taborets, weighted it with the cornices of his ceilings, the rails of his balustrades, the basins of his fountains—until he seemed to shake his scepter as despot over all the beast kind. He was a hunter, a warrior and a statesman; the instincts of all three had their representation in this, his high place. He was a voluptuary, a tyrant, and a shedder of blood; his audience-chamber told it of him. Thus, though he had crumbled to ashes forty years before, and the efforts of the world to forget him had almost succeeded, he left a portrait behind him that would endure as long as his palace stood.

The light of the Judean sun came in a harlequinade of twenty colors, but, where it fell and was reproduced, Nature had mastered the kaleidoscope and made it a glory. The immense space, peopled with graven images, yet animated with ghostly swaying of hangings, had its own shifting currents of air, drafts that were streaming winds, cool and scented with the aromatic woods of the furniture. The portals were closed, and there was no sound. Sun, wind and silence ennobled Herod's mistakes.

The four stood longer than they knew. Then Agrippa made a little sound, a sudden in-taking of the breath.

"See!" he whispered, laying a hand on Capito's shoulder and pointing with the other. "That statue!"

Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of a woman, cut from Parian marble. It was a drowsy image, the head fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose. So perfect was the work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch. Some imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this. Indeed, at first glance there was startlement for the four. A warm human flush had mantled the stone, and Marsyas' brows drew together, but he could not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes.

"A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between thumb and forefinger.

"A statue," Agrippa assured him. "The illumination is from the batement light above. Come nearer!"

He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three paces from the wall.

"It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall.

"Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity.

"He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away."

Capito shivered.

"What punishment!" he exclaimed.

"Punishment! They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!"

But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue.

"She was beautiful," he said after a silence.

"Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector's back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes.

"Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled."

"Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall.

"He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the memory of it. She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever bewitched me. Her mouth—Praxiteles would have turned from Lais' lips to hers."

Agrippa's hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a little within the edge of the molding.

"Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her bosom—a very cloud of night loomed into filaments—"

An inert, moldy breath reached Marsyas. He turned his head. The panel between the cestophori was gone and a square of darkness yawned its miasma into the hall.

The prince made a lightning movement; noiselessly the two servants dived into the blackness; Marsyas followed; after him, the prince.

An eclipsing wall began to slide between them and the hail they had left.

"Her arms were languidly lifted—arms that for whiteness shamed this marble—" the old man was saying as the panel glided back into place and shut them in darkness.

"Ow!" Agrippa whispered in delight, "he tells that story better every year!"