Saul of Tarsus: A Tale of the Early Christians

by Elizabeth Miller

CHAPTER XIX

THE DELIVERANCE

There followed time for diverse and earnest meditation for Marsyas: He criticized himself sarcastically, for permitting himself to be so easily entrapped, and cast about him for means of escape. He found by successive trials that the siege was perfect. Half of Alexandria's garrison had been posted about the district. The more he considered his predicament, the more an atmosphere of impending danger weighted the air of the Nazarene community.

He did not seek the hospitality of the Nazarenes, because he had not come to the point of admitting that he was to remain among them. At nightfall, while the roar of the reveling city without swept over the community, he hoped to find some unguarded spot in the Roman lines, but his hope was vain. With his attention thus forced upon the people penned in with him, he began to wonder if there might not yet be some profit in counsel with his fellows, hemmed in for some purpose by Flaccus.

He found the inhabitants gathered in a broad space in one of the streets, where at one time a statue or a fountain might have stood, but after a few minutes' listening, he heard only prayers and words of submission to the unknown peril threatening them. Angry and disappointed he flung himself away from the gathering, to spend the night in the streets.

But after the first gust of his anger, it was brought home to him very strongly, that these people were gifted with a new courage, the courage of submission—to him the most mysterious and impossible of powers. Led from this idle conclusion into yet deeper contemplation of the Nazarene character, he found himself admitting astonishing evidences in their favor. He had known not a few of them. Stephen had been beatified, the most exalted, yet the sweetest character that he had ever known. Lydia, wavering and hesitating between Judaism and the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, struggled with fine points of conscience, and persisted, in the face of terror,—the most potent controlling agent, Marsyas had believed, over the spirit of womanhood. The Nazarene body at Ptolemais had displayed before him a humanness in subjection, that, in spite of his own resolute disposition, seemed triumphant, after all. They had preached peace, and had maintained it in the face of the most trying circumstances. On ship-board, he had been shown that they were long-suffering. About him now, while Alexandria rioted and reveled in excess, their order and decorum were highly attractive. These were excellences that he did not willingly see; circumstances and environment had forced their recognition upon him.

At a late hour, he was sought and found by their pastor, the tall old teacher, whom he had come to consider as a man whom, for his own spiritual welfare, he should shun.

"Young brother," the pastor said, "thou art without shelter here, and imprisoned among us. I respect thy wish to be left to thyself, yet we can not see thee unhoused. I have a cell in yonder ruined wall; it is solitary and secluded. Do thou take it, and I shall find shelter among my people."

Marsyas felt his cheeks grow hot, under the cover of the night.

"I thank thee," he responded, "but I am here only for a little time. I am young and hardy; I will not turn thee out of thy shelter."

"If thy time with us is stated, thou art fortunate. Alexandria hath not set her limit upon our imprisonment. Yet, I shall find a niche in the house of one of my people; be not ashamed to take my place."

Without waiting for the young man to protest, the Nazarene signed him to follow, and led on through the dark to the place indicated—the remnant of an ancient house—a single standing wall of earth, sufficiently thick to be excavated to form a shallow cave. There was room enough for a pallet of straw within, and a reed matting hung before the opening. The pastor bade the young man enter, blessed him and disappeared.

Marsyas sat down in the cramped burrow, and, resting his head on his hands and his elbows on his knees, said to himself, in discomfiture:

"Beshrew the enemy that permits you to find no fault in him!"

It was not the last time in the memorable three days of imprisonment that he frowned and deprecated the excellence of his hosts.

He accepted their simple hospitality in moody helplessness, and spent his time either hovering on the outskirts of their nightly meetings, or vainly searching for a plan to escape. He noted finally that they stinted themselves food, but gave him his usual share; water appeared less often and less plentiful. The pastor was not less confident, but more withdrawn within himself: the elders became more grave, the people, oppressed and prayerful. At times, when the gradual growth of distress became more apparent, Marsyas walked apart and chid himself for his resourcelessness.

"I am another mouth to feed, among these people," he declared. "And by the testimony of mine own instinct, I am not the least cause of that which hath thrown this siege about them! I will get out!"

He began at sunset the second day to discover the extent of the besieged quarter and sound every point for the strength of its particular blockade. He found that the Nazarene portion of Rhacotis stretched from the landings of the bay inland to a series of granaries where Rhacotis, in its smaller days, had built receptacles for the wheat which the rustics brought for shipping. To the west it ended against a stockade for cattle, upon which mounted sentries could overlook a great deal of the quarter. To the east, the limit was a compact row of well-built houses, remnants of the Egyptian aristocratic portion in Alexander's time. The streets intersecting the row and leading into pagan Rhacotis were each closed by a sentry. After his investigations, Marsyas felt that here was the weakest spot in the siege.

Central in the row was a tall structure, with ruined clay pylons, blank of wall and, except for supporting beams, roofless. It had been a temple, but was now a dwelling, a veritable warren since the Nazarenes were all driven to occupy a portion which could shelter only a fifth of the number comfortably.

Upon this structure, Marsyas' eye rested. Either it would be closely watched from without or not at all. It depended upon the features of the wall fronting on the street at the rear, in which the sentries were posted.

For once he blessed a Nazarene night-gathering, when he saw family after family emerge from the tunnel-like doors of the temple-house and proceed silently toward the meeting of their brethren in the street below.

A long time after the last emerged and disappeared into the dark, Marsyas crossed to the doors and knocked. For a moment after his first trial, he listened lest there be an answer. He knocked more loudly a second time, and, after the third, he opened the unlocked doors, and, putting in his head, called. The heated interior was totally dark and silent.

He stepped in and closed the doors behind him. When at last his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a single immense chamber; the entire interior of the old temple was unbroken by partition of any kind. Above him, he saw the crossing of great palm-trunks, bracing the walls, and over them the blue arch of the night. At the rear, the starlight showed him the wall abutting the street of the sentries. It was absolutely blank and fully thirty feet in height.

Marsyas sighed and shook his head. Though he made the leap in safety, he could not alight without noise enough to attract the whole garrison to the spot. But, determined to make his investigation thorough before he surrendered the scheme as hopeless, he felt about the great chamber and stumbled on a rude ladder leaning against a side-wall. He climbed it, to find that it reached to a ledge, where the deeper lower half of the wall was surmounted by a clerestory just half its thickness. He found here rows of straw pallets where the overflow of Nazarenes took refuge by night. He pulled up his ladder, set it on the ledge and climbed again, finding himself at the uppermost rung within reach of one of the palm-trunks. He seized it, tried it for solidity and drew himself up on the top of the wall.

Fearing detection by the sentries more than the return of the householders, he crept with caution to the angle at the rear, and looked down into the street.

He located two sentries, but no nearer the back of the temple than the two streets opening into the other several yards away to the north and south. He lay still to note the direction of their post and found that, in truth, they turned just under him. At a point half-way between either end of their walk, they were more than two hundred paces apart. But Marsyas looked down the sheer wall. He could not possibly accomplish it without injury or discovery or both.

With a heavy heart he retraced his steps, descended into the old temple and made his way toward the doors. Before he reached them, he frightened himself by stumbling upon a huge light object that rolled away toward the entrance. He followed cautiously, and touched it again while fumbling for the latch. He felt of it, and finally, swinging the door open, saw by the starlight that it was a huge hamper of twisted palm-fiber, tall enough to contain a man and wide enough for two. He set the thing aside and went out into the night.

To-morrow was the last day of his confinement, but he did not expect liberty. He did not doubt that the city meditated the destruction of the Nazarenes, nor that Flaccus would permit him to be overlooked in the general slaughter. Not the least of his fears was that Lydia might be thrust among them at any moment, to share the fate he had striven so hard to avert from her.

He returned to his cave in the ruined wall, and lay down on his matting, not to sleep, nor even to plan intelligently, but to submit to his distress.

At high noon the third day, on the summit of the Serapeum in Egyptian Rhacotis, there appeared a slender figure in the burnoose of an Arab.

Five hundred feet distant, in the beleaguered Nazarene settlement, a woman stood in her doorway to pray, that the earthen roof might not be between her supplication and the Master in Heaven. She saw the microscopic figure on the pylon of the Temple, but daily a priest came there to worship the sun. She saw the figure lift and extend its arms, presently, but that was part of the idolatrous ritual, she thought. She dropped her eyes to the crucifix in her hands and her lips moved slowly.

At that instant, at her feet, as a thunderbolt strikes from the clouds, an arrow plunged half its length into the hard sand, and leaned, quivering strongly toward the tiny shape on the summit of the pylon.

The Nazarene woman dropped her crucifix and shrieked.

The slow fisher-husband appeared beside her, and, seeing the fallen cross, picked it up with fumbling fingers, muttering an exclamation of remonstrance.

"Look!" the Nazarene woman cried, pointing to the half-buried bolt, still quivering.

The fisherman gazed at it.

"Whence came it?" he asked.

The trembling woman shook her head and clasped and unclasped her hands.

"An affront from the heathen," the man said. "It was despatched to murder thee. The Lord's hand stayed it; blessed be His name!"

He plucked the arrow with an effort from the sand, and looked at it.

"It is a witness of the Master's care; let us take it to the pastor," he suggested.

The trembling woman followed her husband as he stepped into the street and raised her eyes to give thanks. She saw that the figure on the summit of the pylon was gone.

The two found the leader of their flock, sitting outside an overcrowded house, bending over a half-finished basket of reeds. Beside him was one complete; at the other hand were his working materials.

"Greeting, children, in Christ's name," he said.

"Greeting, lord; praise to God in the highest!"

The Nazarene woman dropped to her knees, and her husband, extending the arrow in agitation, stumbled through their story.

"May His name be glorified for ever," the woman murmured at the end.

But the pastor took the arrow and examined it. It was uncommon; the story was uncommon, and he believed that there was more than a wanton attempt at murder in its coming. The bolt was tipped with a pointed flint, and feathered with three long, delicate papyrus cases, one dark, two white. The pastor felt of one of the white feathers, and presently ripped it off the shaft. It opened in his hand. Within was lettering.

After a little puzzled study of it, he shook his head and put it down. He loosened the other from the transparent gum and opened it. Written in another hand were the following words in Greek:

"To the Nazarene to whom this cometh:
"Deliver the arrow unto the young Jew, Marsyas, who dwells among you, but is not of your number."

The pastor took up the arrow and the papyrus and arose at once.

"Verily, a sending, but it is not for us. Abide here until I deliver it to him that expects it."

He turned toward the ruined wall where Marsyas secluded himself.

The pastor knocked on the dried earth wall without the cave, and the matting was thrust aside. The young Jew stood there.

"I bring thee a message from without," the pastor said at once. "Peace and the love of Christ enter thy heart and uphold thee."

He put the arrow into the young man's hand and saluting him with the sign of the cross, went his way.

"What blind incaution," Marsyas said, after he had stared in astonishment at the things delivered him. "A message! How does he know that he does not bear to me treachery against his people, and his undoing!"

But he sat down and undid the white case.

"That is Agrippa's writing!" he declared after he had read it.

He took up the other. The writing was in Sanskrit.

"O white Brother:" it ran; "this by an arrow from the strong bow of thy lord Prince. Him I compelled. Come forth from among the Nazarenes! Deliver thyself, by nightfall, in the pure name of her whom thou lovest! Come ere that time, if thou canst, but fail not, otherwise, to be in the forefront of Flora's followers! Be prepared to possess her!

"Fail not, by all the gods!
"Vasti, by the hand of Khosru, priest to Siva."

Marsyas seized the writing with both hands and sprang up; reread it with straining eyes; walked the two steps permitted him in his cave over and over again; or leaned against the earthen wall to think.

In the pure name of her whom he loved! Lydia? He felt his Essenic self dissolve in a flood of glad confusion, for the moment; instead of self-reproach, he felt more joy than he ever hoped to know in a life devoted to vengeance; instead of guilt, an uplift that separated him for an instant from even his terror for the rapture of contemplating Lydia.

Then the grave alarm that the bayadere's letter aroused possessed him. A rereading filled him with consternation. The unrevealed peril that he was to avert, the intimation that Lydia was endangered, the practically insurmountable obstacles in the way of his escape, shook him strongly in his self-control. He made no plans, for desperate conditions did not admit of formulated action. To pass outposts of half a cohort of brawny guards offered success only by a miracle, and the miraculous is not methodical.

Presently, he burst out of his burrow and tramped through the bright hours of the afternoon, cursing the sun for its deadly haste to get under the rim of the world, and dizzy with the pressure of terror and anxiety.

Near the softening hours of the latter part of the day, while the awakening revel roared louder in the distance, he stopped before the ancient temple. The great hamper stood without the heavy entrance with three little Nazarene children tying ropes to the interstices between the fibers to pull it after them like a wagon. Marsyas looked at the hamper, glanced with intent eyes at the front wall,—a duplicate, except for the entrance, of the rear one,—and then rushed away in search of Ananias, the pastor.

He found the pastor sitting outside the house that had given him refuge, cutting soles for sandals from a hide that lay by his side.

The Nazarene raised a face so kindly and interested that the young man dropped down beside him and blundered through his story, in his haste to lay the plan for escape before the old man.

"At sunset," he hurried on, "or when the night is sufficiently heavy to hide us, I can be let down in the hamper by the rear wall of the old temple—if thou wilt bid some of thy congregation to help me! I pray thee—let not thy belief deny me this help, for the life of my beloved, or mayhap her sweet womanhood, dependeth upon my escape!"

He clasped his hands, and gazed with beseeching eyes into the pastor's face. He did not permit himself to think what he would do if the old man denied him.

"It is manifest," Ananias said, after a pause for thought, "that only Nazarenes are to be confined herein. And thou, being a Jew, art here under false imprisonment. We shall not be glad to have thee suffer with us."

"Yes, yes!" Marsyas cried. "I am falsely accused, and thou wilt avert an injustice—nay, by the holy death of the prophets!" he broke off, "if I could bear you all to refuge after me, I would do it!"

"It is the spirit of Christ in thee, my son; nourish it! Yet be not distressed for our sake; He who holdeth the world in the hollow of His hand is with us."

Marsyas awaited anxiously the old man's further speech, when he lapsed into silence after his confident claim of divine protection.

"Give us the plan, my son, and we will help thee," he said at last.

Marsyas took the old man's hand and lifted it impulsively to his lips.

While yet the Serapeum was crowned with pale light, but the more squalid streets were blackening, Marsyas, led by Ananias, came to the old temple-house, and briefly unfolded his plan to three stalwart young Gentiles, who had turned their backs upon Jove and assumed the grace of Jesus in their hearts. The hamper with which the children had played all day was brought. Three troll-lines, each forty feet in length and borrowed from the fisher Nazarenes who lived along the bay, were securely knotted in three slits about the rim of the basket. Then, waiting only for the rapidly rising dusk, Marsyas, the three young Gentiles and the pastor climbed cautiously to the top of the side-wall of the old structure, and pulled up the hamper after them.

At the angle in the rear, Marsyas, who led the way, stopped. Below it was already night, and he could hear the steps of the sentries in the echoing passage. He had not planned how he should pass them after his descent, but the houses opposite were dark and he did not look for interference, if he took refuge among them.

He stepped into the hamper, and the three young men laid hold on the ropes. The pastor spread his hands in blessing over Marsyas' head, and when the sound of the sentries' footsteps was faintest, the hamper, with little sound and at cautious speed, was let down the steep wall.

It touched the sand with a grinding sound. Marsyas leaped out, jerked one of the ropes in signal and the hamper sprang aloft.

With a muttered blessing on the heads of the apostates, Marsyas leaped across the narrow street, to the shadows of the other houses. Creeping from porch to porch with the sheltering shade of overhanging roofs upon him, he passed guard after guard, until the row finally ended and the open space between him and safety on the bay showed up a line of soldiers guarding the water-front.

The distance was not great, and success thus far had made Marsyas strong. With a prayer to the God of those who help themselves, he burst from the passage into the great open of the docking and sped straight for the bay.

Instantly a howl went up, a pilum launched after him, shot over his shoulder, the rush of twenty mailed feet came in pursuit, swords, spears and axes flew and fell behind him, but panting and unfaltering he rushed straight to the edge of the wharf and dropped out of sight into the bay.

The guards came after him, and hanging over the wharf looked down for him to come up. They saw the circles of water widen and widen, grow stiller and stiller, and finally cease to move, but the head for which they looked did not rise.

Meanwhile Marsyas, native of Galilee and lover of her blue sea, arose between sleeping boats far out into the bay. He caught a chain and clung while he drew breath and rested. Not a vessel was manned; every seaman, officer and passenger had gone ashore to follow Flora.

Presently, he looked about and took his bearings. There through a darkening lane of water, a hundred feet long, he made out the ornate aplustre of Agrippa's ship.

He let himself down into the water again, and, swimming around to port, away from land, climbed by her anchor-chains and got upon deck.

The ship was wholly silent and deserted. None was there to ask why he came so unconventionally aboard.

He went to the cabin prepared for the prince's reception, and with steward keys still fast to his belt let himself in and prepared to return to Alexandria.