CHAPTER XI
THE HOUSE OF DEFENSE
Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, the usurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation.
By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowed for foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About such a day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed.
Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed and turned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forget prayers.
It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he served was the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement of the white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigor of the Pharisee Saul, the naïve sophistication of the Romanized Herod had constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that the world's manner was either cultured or simple.
But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowing world, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself to control it.
It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in him that were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night his fingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room had become noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that had come and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what he had sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss he did not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had been bidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughness of his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was out of place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty.
After the newness of his experience wore off, as it did in a very short time, the days began to go with wearing deliberation, as all days go that are counted impatiently. His sorrow and his wrongs were his only companions; as his anxiety for his liberty and Agrippa's success increased, his healthy indifference to his unwholesome atmosphere began to decline rapidly, his resentment against his oppression to grow. The six weeks ebbed out and passed. His anxiety flowed into his bitterness and his bitterness into his anxiety until they were one. Troubled about his liberty, he clenched his teeth and thought on Saul; thinking of his impotent position against the powerful Pharisee, he watched the harbor from the counting-room and trembled whenever a sail crossed it.
Inactivity became eventually unbearable, for an unemployed moment was a miserable moment. He could not devise a way to liberty, nor further aid his one ally into power, so he turned to his own resources against Saul.
Continuing cautiously to visit the proseuchæ by night, he learned something, which he heard casually at the time, but which eventually developed into a matter of importance. He heard that the Nazarenes were flying from Jerusalem in great numbers, scattering in bodies from Damascus to Alexandria, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The rabbis of Ptolemais were concerned to discover that there was a community hiding in the city, because they feared the evils of a persecution, established in Ptolemais, as much as the influence of the apostasy upon the faithful.
When Marsyas admitted casually to himself, after he had heard the tidings, that the apostasy must have numbers of followers, he was carried in his thinking to the realization that numbers meant strength and strength meant resistance. Why, then, should not these people turn on the Pharisee? Here, in a twinkling, he believed that he had discovered abettors, allies whom he could instantly enlist in his own cause.
But before he could deduce resolution from this electrifying admission, events began to mark his days.
Late one afternoon, after the time for his ransoming was out, a man approached the opening in the grating. The shadows in the badly-lighted chamber made client and steward and all the appointments in the dingy counting-room imperfect shapes to the eye. The new-comer leaned down to the opening and peered at Marsyas as he pushed a fibula of gold through the opening.
"I am in need," the man said. "Canst thou not give me the value of this in money?"
The voice was resonant and strangely familiar to Marsyas. In the gloom the great lifted shoulders of the man, bending from his height, brought back on a sudden the chamber in the college at Jerusalem. The young Essene came closer to the grating and looked at the applicant.
There was a mutual start of recognition; in Marsyas perhaps the chill that a fugitive feels who finds himself detected. The man was the Rabbi Eleazar.
"Thou! Here, with them?" the rabbi exclaimed in a suppressed whisper.
"I am here, Rabbi," Marsyas replied, "but alone."
Eleazar looked at him, but the examination under the difficulty of the gloom was not satisfactory; besides, there was the stir of others who had come in behind him and were able to listen. Marsyas swept the fibula into one of the coin-baskets and passed a handful of silver to the rabbi.
"Meet me without at the end of the first watch to-night," the rabbi added, as he thanked Marsyas. "Do not fear me, for I am also a victim of thine enemy."
Marsyas saluted him, and the rabbi disappeared. A figure in armor stepped up to the place where Eleazar had stood. He was helmeted and greaved and had a line of purple about the hem of his short tunic. He applied for a loan and yielded as indorsement the favor of Cæsar and the family name of Aulus. Marsyas withdrew hastily into the overhanging shadow of the grating, received the officer's note, counted out the gold and drew in a free breath when another stepped into his place. It was Vitellius' legionary.
"Am I run to earth?" Marsyas asked himself.
At the end of the first watch that night he prepared to follow Eleazar's suggestion, if only to discover what to expect. That he was not filled with confidence nor resigned to suffer what might befall him was evident by his slipping a knife into his belt when he made himself ready.
He went out into the unlighted street and looked about him for Eleazar. The tall figure of the rabbi emerged from the darkness a moment after Marsyas appeared and approached the young man.
"Have no fear," the rabbi said. "We are common victims of the same unjust suspicion; let us not be suspicious of each other."
"Thy words are fair, Rabbi, but I do not know thee. Whom I most trusted hath failed me of late; it must follow then that I am not sure of strangers. Tell me first thy business with me."
"I am Eleazar, the rabbi, who sat with Saul in the college that day when Joel, the Levite, came with news of Stephen of Galilee."
"I know that; also that thou knowest that Saul oppresses me. Thou art a rabbi and zealous for the Law. Art thou sent for me on Saul's mission?"
"No, brother."
"Or the proconsul's?"
"I know nothing of the proconsul; I am here, driven from Jerusalem by Saul who charged me with apostasy because I would not aid him in his oppression."
For a moment Marsyas was dumb with amazement.
"He is mad!" he cried when speech came to him.
"Is it madness when he persecutes others, but villainy when he oppresses thee?" Eleazar demanded.
"I pray thy pardon," Marsyas said quickly, "if I seem to miscall his work. It might follow in reason that he should accuse me, but thou—thou a rabbi, accepted before the Law and clean-skirted before all Judea—that he should accuse thee of apostasy seems to be the work of no sane man."
"But it is! He layeth plans keen as Joshua's who warred under God's banner, and he striketh with the strength of an army. Unless he is stayed he will devastate to the end!"
Marsyas came close and laid a hand on the rabbi's shoulder.
"What of Stephen?" he asked with stiffened lips. "How did it come to pass?"
For a moment there was silence, and then the rabbi drew up and shook himself.
"It will not help thee, young brother," he said, with an impatience which was only fortification against feeling. "It is ill enough to take a blasphemer and deliver him up to punishment; ask no more, for it wrenches me to think of it."
Marsyas stood frozen; he did not want to hear more, after the rabbi had spoken, but when the reviving current of life stirred in his veins, it was turned to a fever for vengeance. Now! Not to wait for safety, or for circumstances or for men or things. It seemed that he should not eat or sleep till his work was done.
Eleazar, seeking to turn the current of the young man's thoughts, which he believed, being unable to see his face, must be sorrowfully retrospective, asked presently:
"Art thou here with—them?"
"With whom?"
"The Nazarenes."
Marsyas seized the rabbi's shoulder with a fresh grasp.
"Where are they?" he demanded.
"Dost thou—in truth, dost thou not know?" he demanded.
"Accused though I am, I am a good Jew, Rabbi. Never until now have I wished to know where they house themselves. But even were it the powers of darkness which alone could help me, now, I should not hesitate! Where are these apostates?"
"Here, in Ptolemais. What wilt thou have of them, Marsyas?"
"Were not heathen and idolaters instruments for the Lord's work? Have not even the beasts of the fields served His ends?"
"What dost thou meditate?"
"Saul's undoing!" Eleazar heard him thoughtfully and answered after a silence.
"So be it, then; if thou choosest that spirit, it must serve. Thou hast a dead friend to avenge and I, the guiltless oppressed to justify. So the one end, the prevention of Saul's work, be attained, what matter if the spirit be mine or thine!"
"Well enough; the means, then! Where are these Nazarenes?"
"They—they meet on the water-front, nightly, since the oppression hath been instituted against them," Eleazar answered reluctantly, as if he doubted the propriety of betraying a knowledge of the apostates' habits.
"Nightly!" Marsyas repeated. "So then to-night! Where is the place? We will go there!"
Eleazar stood undecided and debated with himself. But the pressure of the young man's impelling firmness assumed material force against him and he yielded doubtfully.
"Come, then," he said, and his hesitation melted in the face of the other's decision.
Marsyas put himself at the rabbi's side and together they tramped through the dark streets toward the poorer districts of Ptolemais, along the harbor. It was poor indeed; the houses were the smallest in the city, low, square boxes of sun-dried earth little higher than a man's head and mere stalls for space and comfort. Each, however, had a numerous tenantry, and wherever doors were opened the two men saw within, now Jews, now Greeks or Romans. Although uproar and disorder common in the lower walks of the city went on in the environments, the particular passage Marsyas and the rabbi walked was quiet though not deserted. But it was a veritable black well, that maintained a swift slope for many rods and indicated the proximity to the water.
"How found you them, in this hole?" Marsyas asked, astonished, in spite of his intent thoughts, at the black labyrinth.
"I, too, was in hiding for my life's sake," Eleazar answered.
The brooding cornices of the houses, visible against the strip of starry sky, rounded suddenly and closed in upon the passage. Marsyas saw that they were nearing a blind end, when a door opened in the cul-de-sac, disclosing several other men preceding Marsyas and the rabbi.
"Haste!" Eleazar whispered, and, seizing Marsyas' hand, ran so that they reached the lighted doorway before it closed again.
They entered with the others, and the bolts were shot behind them.