CHAPTER XXIV
THE DIGGED PIT
Junia raised herself hastily.
"Call the slaves," she commanded the servant who had announced Marsyas, and, in a moment, half a score of house-slaves rushed in from various openings leading into the atrium.
"Away with this and that and that," she exclaimed pointing to the statue of a bacchante, that had not been visible in the chamber on the occasion of Marsyas' expected calls; a tray of wine and a tablet with a list of charms and philters sent recently from a haruspex. "Bring me a shawl—close around my neck: curse thee for a blunderer, Iste; thou shalt pay for that scratch! Here, unwind the scarf about my hips and fold it less closely; the amulet, take it off! By Ate! Here: Caligula's note, spread open! Into the brazier with it. Do I smell of wine? Fetch hither—that fresco! The Pursuit of Daphne! Draw the arras over it! Quick! The unguentarium, I said, snail! The one with the attar. Now, look about. Is there anything in sight to disturb a vestal? If I find it afterward, twenty lashes for you all!"
Mistress and slave looked anxiously over the chamber, but nothing unseemly greeted their eyes. Junia sank back on her couch, not now so recumbent, but at ease.
"Go fetch the Jew," she said, the languor of her manner combatted by the fire in her eyes.
A moment later Marsyas appeared in the archway.
She arose and came to meet him. When he took her extended hands, she led him to the light of the cancelli and inspected him.
"Sit," she said, drawing him down on the divan under the casement. "And speak first. Only a word, so I may see if the prologue is indeed as tragic as the mask."
"Let the mask suffice," he answered, "the prologue might be insufferable."
"Proh pudor! Thy friend the Herod hath just been here with pagan oaths upon his lips about thy dullness. I tell thee it is hard enough to make him walk as he should, but a groaning comrade is a gravel in his shoe. If thou wouldst manage him, be merry. Remember we have this Herod to crown, though he stood on the Tarpeian Rock and sang sonnets in dishonor of Cæsar."
"By the certainty of Death, I have," he said sententiously.
She looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he seemed to forget her, in his preoccupation.
"I am a generous woman, Marsyas," she said softly. "I do not resent thy lack of confidence in me!"
"Nay!" he exclaimed. "My lack of confidence, lady? What meanest thou?"
"In thy bosom, gentle sir, thou keepest thine own counsel, and wearest signals of thy self-containment on thy brow. Wherefore, I am informed thou hast thoughts that I may not know!"
"But I spare thee my sorrows, my cynicism, my hopelessness," he protested earnestly, "my disbelief in humankind."
"O Marsyas, wert thou not Jewish, I should call thee unmanly. Listen!" She laid a warm hand, colored like a primrose, upon his.
"Thou wast an anchorite; thou didst attain manhood's stature and mind as an anchorite; into the world thou camest with all an anchorite's slander of the poor world in thee. The eye is a spaniel; the tyrant Prejudice controls even its images. I warned thee in Alexandria. I confess that there is evil in the world, but it is more the work of an elementary impulse rather than calculation. Flaccus is bad, but because he is in love. Agrippa does foolhardy things, because he is ambitious. What? Did the preachment afflict thee which I delivered the other day upon thy levity and riotous living?"
He shook his head.
"Nay, but this moment's preachment crosses me," he said. "Thou offerest pardon for all the wickedness in the world, and I, sworn to punish one evil deed, am thus constrained, if I harken unto thee, to hold off my hand."
"Now, thou approachest the deep-hidden secret which I may not know. Whom wilt thou punish? Flaccus or Classicus?"
He hesitated. His vital hate of Saul of Tarsus, his fear for Lydia, his love and its deep wound, were things too close to the soul for him willingly to bring forth and display to this woman who acknowledged only a mind, and not a spirit. Yet it seemed unfair to withhold anything, however sacred, from one who had unbosomed so much to him.
"I lead a selfish life and an unhappy one. I am stricken in my loves; one dead, one a murderer, a third faithless; a fourth I use to speed me in mine intents concerning the other two. If I avenge the death of one, I displease his spirit! If I visit punishment on his murderer, I make it possible for the destroyer of my love-story to go on. If I withhold my hand, I give another, much beloved, unto death. And him I help, I help for mine own use. My life is at cross purposes; my right hand worketh against the left!"
"Thy love?" she repeated softly, with a question in her tone. But he did not answer it.
"A hopeless tangle," she said at last, "from which our ruling philosophers, degenerate imitators of Pyrrho, offer but one escape. Turn from it, cease to trouble over it, leave it, cast off all thought and memory of it—and begin anew!"
He shook his head, his eyes on the pavement, his hands clasped before him. But the primrose hand found his again.
"Thou canst not, by the choicest revenge, force Thanatos to yield up thy dead; thou confessest the evil thou workest in revenge as equal to the satisfaction; thou complainest that thy love is faithless—what else? So many thy pains, I can not remember them all; but in them all there is not the worth of one of thy sleepless nights. If thou canst not be a Spartan, be a Stoic; if not an avenger, then a forgetter; if not a lover, then a gallant! Above all things, harken unto a pagan truth: love's a lusty wight and can suffer forty mortal wounds and love again. None but an ostrich loves but once! Perchance I was right at first; thou shouldst have begun thine education in the first of Flora's celebration."
He winced, but presently raised his head.
"What didst thou when the procession carried me away that night?" he demanded, searching her face.
"When thou didst go away with the procession?" she laughed. "I went with them—of a necessity."
"And how didst thou escape?"
"When they all departed after Flora danced."
Thus beyond doubt assured that she had witnessed the dance of Flora, he was afraid to inquire further, lest he betray Lydia. But he wanted mightily to know if she had recognized the alabarch's daughter.
The disturbing reflection diverted his line of thought. Many of the night's events which the greater one had overshadowed came back to him. He saw again the miraculous dance of Brahma on the roof of the Temple of Rannu, fled again with Lydia in his arms into the musky shrine and thence into the city; strove hard to convince himself that if he, sharpened of sight by love, had not recognized Lydia except for the bayadere's note and his acquaintance with Lydia's apostasy and her former defense of the Nazarenes, others could not have done so. Again he fought with Flaccus and discovered Agrippa in the dark and abandoned street in Alexandria. And now the image of Eutychus became particularly distinct.
His brow blackened suddenly and he sprang to his feet.
"It is solved!" he cried, striking the palm of one hand with the other. "By the wrath of God, he is Flaccus' emissary. He turned on Agrippa in Alexandria when Flaccus ambushed the prince! He was part of the conspiracy! It was no blind blow that Agrippa struck. And the soul in me nourishes a lie or he meditates more work for the proconsul in this!"
Throughout his intensely confident accusation, Junia had watched him with changing eyes. She had had to feel her way frequently in this last hour.
"What?" she asked finally.
In a few and rapid words, Marsyas told her of Eutychus' theft and flight, but his ideas hasted from his narrative to more testimony in favor of his conclusion. He remembered Eutychus' jealousy of Drumah, his ruffian mistreatment of Lydia when the prætor moved against the Nazarenes, his attempt to expose her to Justin Classicus because, his jealousy of Marsyas revived, he had no other way of retaliating; and finally of his humiliation at Marsyas' hands before Agrippa and Drumah.
"Bitter fool that I was not to understand him in time!" he cried. "In my soul, I know that we follow him to a pitfall in this matter!"
Junia slipped her fingers along the gilt grooves in the arm of the divan. Flaccus was a clumsy villain, of a surety! What overt conspiracies he evolved! A wild boar of the German forests would not make more clamor at its attacks! A wonder he had not exposed her, ere this. But for his influence, which made her a place in Cæsar's house, she had given up his service long ago. Her lips curled with disgust and perplexity.
"Forewarning," she said gloomily, "is a torture when forearming avails naught."
He caught the depression in her tone and turned to her quickly.
"Agrippa hath been here, Marsyas," she continued. "Yet he was not to be stopped, I thought, then, that it was only the knave's playing for time!"
"What dost thou mean?" he demanded. "Tell me!"
"Agrippa was here. Eutychus hath been caught, but Piso notifies the Herod that the prisoner hath appealed to Cæsar, claiming to have information against Agrippa which concerns Cæsar's life and welfare!"
Marsyas seized her arm.
"What sayest thou?" he cried.
"And since thou hast uncovered Flaccus' hand supporting the villain, Agrippa is in greater peril than I had supposed!"
For a moment the two looked at each other: Junia with uneasiness on her face, and Marsyas transfixed. He saw his plans against Saul of Tarsus tumbling; he saw the Pharisee triumphing over Lydia!
"It may still be hoped," she ventured, "that the knave lies!"
"Junia, thou knowest Agrippa! It is my terror lest the knave be armed with a truth!"
"Out with it all," she went on desperately. "The Herod is convinced that he is innocent—this time—of any ill-will against Cæsar, and he came here and spent the greater part of an hour, beseeching me to use my influence to hasten Cæsar's hearing of Eutychus!"
"In God's name, answer! Did you refuse him?"
"I did! I besought him to let Cæsar follow his own way, since the emperor is notedly slow in hearing charges in these later years. I assured him that Cæsar might be more displeased, urged against his inclination to hear a stupid slave, than the slave's charge could make him. But the Herod is more stubborn than the classic steed of Judea. He demanded haughtily of me, if I expected him to treat with a slanderer or beg a truce with a lie. Then I refused him my offices. Wherefore he hath posted off to Antonia!"
"She will not harken to him—!" he cried with sudden desperation.
"O Marsyas, this day I should be exorcised as a fury, bringing evil happenings. But better the sorry truth than a fair lie. Antonia hath lived out of the world for the last decade, as hast thou. But her seclusion hath achieved the opposite harm, that is hatched by solitariness. She retired, full of years and honor; the world, approaching her door, comes in fair garments, bringing tokens of esteem, talks of ancient triumphs, the virtues of Antonia and the great respect Cæsar hath for her. Wherefore, kindly treated by the world, remembering nothing but the good of the old days and believing in her sweet dotage that she crushed evil when she crushed Sejanus, her natural strategic sense hath been lost in a great, all-enveloping charity. Her natural nobility hath outgrown the wariness which aids youth, and her dimmed sight sees things of stature, only, or of high relief. She will see in the prince's desire only a desire to clear himself of a charge and she will honor him for it! She will do his bidding!"
Marsyas snatched up his cloak and sprang toward the archway.
"Let me to her!" he cried.
"Wait!" Junia cried. "Be prepared against defeat, though it never come! What wilt thou do, if she be immovable, or already gone—for Cæsar is in Tusculum to-day?"
Marsyas stopped and his face grew ashen. He saw Lydia again, among the stones of the rabble, and murder leaped into his heart.
"Kill Eutychus!" he declared desperately.
"It would be fatal for Agrippa," she protested.
His hunted ideas turned then upon Cæsar. Suddenly he rushed back to Junia and seized her hands.
"Thou art close to Cæsar," he said rapidly and with great supplication in his voice, "and thou art in Cæsar's favor! Beseech him and right Agrippa's mistakes, I implore thee! Help me, Junia! Be my right arm! Promise me thine intercession!"
Her face suffused, and she waited a moment before she could trust her voice.
"For thy sake, Marsyas," she answered. "I give thee my word!"
He pressed her hands to his lips and ran out of the house. She dropped back on her couch and put her fingers to her temples.
"Save Agrippa, to kill Saul, to save Lydia, for this Judean vestal's sake?" she speculated to herself. "And where doth Junia profit? Ah! I shall get him in debt, and extort mine own price! Jew or Gentile, he will not think it exorbitant, for under it all, he is a man! But to Tusculum!"
She clapped her hands and ordered her litter.