CHAPTER XXXII
SANCTUARY
The cluster of vagabonds hanging before the alabarch's mansion stayed no longer after the breezes brought the first sound of tumult which announced a rarer sport elsewhere. In a twinkling the Regio Judæorum was silent and deserted.
Except for the gusts of far-off turmoil, the cooing of pigeons in towers, the clashing of palm-leaves, the creak of crazy gates in the wind, the casual calling of Numidian cranes or the crowing of poultry were the only sounds in the quarter—lonesome, nature sounds, signals of a householder's absence.
But it seemed as if the Regio Judæorum listened and waited.
After Agrippa's departure, the alabarch came into his presiding-room, without purpose and visibly uneasy. Lydia followed him, and, at a look from her father, came close to his chair and mingled her yellow-brown curls with his white locks.
The silence over the quarter had become oppressive and the slightest break would have been no less grateful than distinct, when it seemed that cautious footsteps pattered by without.
The two stirred and listened.
After a moment, they heard others, very swift and soft, as if many were running by a-tiptoe. There were whispers and rustlings, excited words cried under the breath.
The two in the presiding-room looked at each other. Had the vagabonds returned to their place for mischief, outside the alabarch's mansion?
Lysimachus stepped to the windows and listened. But Lydia stood still, dreading without understanding that which he might hear.
East and west, far and near, sounds were drifting in and passing toward the New Port, sounds as if a multitude hastened in one direction. Above these stealthy, fugitive, whispered noises, there came freshened uproar from pagan Alexandria, swift, high, relentless and carrying like fire on a wind.
As they stood thus, perplexed and alarmed, Vasti appeared like a shadow out of the dusk and caught the alabarch's arm.
"It is come!" she hissed with compelling vehemence. "To the Synagogue! Fly! For the hosts of Siva are upon you even now!"
Lysimachus grasped the grill of the window, and turned slowly toward his daughter.
"Lydia?" he asked helplessly.
The girl came to him, and Vasti began to motion her toward the street.
"What is it? What passeth?" the alabarch insisted, unable to act without perfect conception of the conditions he had to fight.
Lydia's eyes, fixed on her father's face, deepened with misery and widened with suffering. The hour had fallen! She was to be the outcast and the abomination at last.
"They accuse me," she said, "of being a Nazarene; that I committed sacrilege, to hold off the mob from Rhacotis—that I was the Dancing Flora!"
The alabarch put his thin hands to his forehead, as if to ward off the conviction, which all the fragmentary intimation against Lydia, and her own words conjoined, threatened to establish in him.
"Is it so, my daughter?" he asked in a benumbed voice.
Cause was submerged in effect; she felt less fear of the confession than of her father's suffering. In the appreciable interval his figure shriveled; age and the encroachment of death showed upon him. The atmosphere of the magistrate, the courtier and the aristocrat dissolved under the anguish of a father and the horror of a Jew. He had surrendered his two sons, Tiberius and Marcus, to paganism; in Lydia, he had reposed the unwatchful faith, that had permitted his other children to apostasize under his roof. He had believed the more in her, and the shock was the greater, therefore.
"Let it be the measure of my conviction, my father," she said sadly, "that I did this thing in the knowledge that I might forfeit thy love!"
He made no movement; his face did not relax from its stunned agony. Lydia awaited its change with flagging heart-beat.
But the thunder of menace from the Gymnasium square rolled in again through the streets of the Regio Judæorum. The alabarch heard it. Up through the mask there struggled not rebuke and condemnation, but the terror of love fearing for its own. He caught Lydia in his arms and turned his straining eyes toward the windows. But the bayadere waited no longer for the arousing of his faculties. She seized his arm and thrust him toward the vestibule.
"Awake! Get you up and be gone! Will you wait to see her perish?"
She did not stop until she had pushed them through the porch into the streets.
"To the Synagogue!" she commanded last, and disappeared as she had come.
All the Regio Judæorum, as far as the Brucheum on the south and the tumble and wash of the Mediterranean on the north, was pouring through the streets toward the New Port.
The alabarch's own servants went hither and thither, knocking at doors, from which other servants presently issued to speed with the alarm over the yet unwarned sections nearer the Synagogue.
After a moment's waiting until the light airs cleared the daze that enmeshed his brain, the alabarch took Lydia under his cloak and fled with his people toward their refuge.
As he went, doorways about them were giving up households, bazaars and booths were emptying of their patrons and proprietors; workshops, their artisans and apprentices; schools, their readers and pupils; the counting-room, the rich men and the borrowers; the squalid angles, the outcast and the beggar. The oppression of terror and the instinct for silence weighted the darkening air; the twilight covered them, and hostile attention was yet far behind them.
So they came: the slaves with marks of perpetual servitude in their ears, and ladies of the Sadducees that had rarely set foot upon the harsh earth; figures in Indian silks and figures in sackcloth; fugitives to whom fear lent wings and fugitives to whom flight was bitterer than death; families and guilds by the hundreds, hurrying together; companies of diverse people separated from their own; sons carrying parents and neighbors bearing the sick; friends forgetting attachments and foes forgetting feuds—until the streets became veritable rivers of running people. And so they went, crowding, pressing, contending, but passing as silently as forty thousand may pass, toward the Synagogue, which was sanctuary and stronghold for them all.
The keepers of the great gates were there, and the huge valves stood wide. The alabarch's old composure reasserted itself, as, amid the panic of his people, he realized their want of leadership. He stepped to one side of the nearest gate, and stood while he watched each and every Jew rush into the darkness and disappear under the great pylons of the Synagogue. Lydia, whom he would have sent in at once, clung to him, and together they stood without.
Meanwhile, out of the distant Brucheum, there came a snarl of monstrous and terrifying proportions. The mob was gaining strength.
The last of the Jews fled praying through the giant gates and pressed themselves into the shelter of the Synagogue. The keeper looked at the alabarch. He lifted his arm, and Lydia and the keeper and he, shutting away, as best they might, the noise of the threatening city, listened, if any belated fugitive came through the dark.
The sound of footsteps approached; a body of people, strangers to the alabarch, appeared; Lydia made a little sound, and moved toward them.
"We also are beset," the foremost said, "can we enter into the protection of the Synagogue?"
"Haste ye, and enter!" the alabarch answered.
And after the hindmost, he and Lydia passed into the sanctuary.
The keepers swung the great valves shut, and the last sound they admitted was a ravening howl, as Alexandria hurled itself into the empty streets of the Regio Judæorum.
Until this time, Lydia had been a part of the unit of terror and self-preservation, but the hurry of the flight had ceased and the wait for events had begun. Then ensued moments for individual ideas. Thus far she had heard no murmur against her. Fear of the Alexandrians had outmeasured the Jews' indignation, or else they had believed the informer to be the father of lies.
There was the never-failing lamp on the lectern, but its light penetrated no farther than the immediate precincts of darkness. The interior was so vast that its great angles melted into shadow. The immense area of marble pavement was cumbered with an army of huddled shapes, and when portentous red light began to sift down through the open roof it fell upon uplifted faces, ghastly with fear, upon bare arms, white and soft or lean and brown, upstretched in supplication. But neither moan nor murmur arose among them who waited upon siege.
Meanwhile the roar of violence encompassed and penetrated all portions of the quarter. Great lights began to mount and redden the sky as torches were applied to houses looted of their riches. The invasion had met no obstacle and the whole region was a-swarm.
Presently, close at hand, the full bellow of freshly-discovered incentive arose, mounting above all other noises until even the Jews, imprisoned within walls of granite, heard it.
"The Jews! the Jews! The Synagogue!"
Involuntarily there arose from the lips of the forty thousand a great moan, muffled, unechoing and filled with terror.
The alabarch stood by Lydia, with his thoughts upon the strength of the Synagogue and the hardihood of the prisoners. But the weight of culpability was heavy upon Lydia; in her great need and longing for the comfort of his confidence, she crept closer to her father and clung to his arm.
"Naught but a ram or ballista can force these gates!" he said. "And we are forty thousand. Alas, that the spirit of Joshua the warrior was not mixed with the spirit of Moses, who gave us the Law!"
The mob came on, now in distinct hearing of the imprisoned Jews. Tremendous trampling without on the stone flagging and dull, fruitless hammering on the valves announced the assault.
The Jews nearer the gates pressed away.
Without, indecision and tumult wrangled among innumerable voices. Great bodies began to shout as one, with mighty lungs:
"Bring out the woman! Give up the Dancing Flora!"
Lydia felt the alabarch tremble and presently the arm to which she clung withdrew from her clasp and passed around her, drawing her close.
"Impius! Insidiis! Succuba! O dea certe!" roared the mob.
But work was doing at the gates. There arose blunt pounding, slowly and heavily delivered as if a multitude wielded a ram. But the reports were too solid to indicate any weakness in the gates, and the keeper of the one attacked watched the sacred stone with a glitter of pride in his eyes.
Presently the hammering ceased.
"Yield us the woman!" the mob roared in the interval. "Give us the woman and save yourselves!"
Those about the alabarch, hearing the demand of the mob, turned great terror-strained eyes upon Lydia, and she hid her face in her father's shoulder.
The smell of burning pitch penetrated the interior; pungent smoke assailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, assuming that the mob hoped to burn the Synagogue.
But there followed an explosion of steam, split by a sharp report, and followed by a howl of exultation. The keeper with wild eyes sprang at the valve. Immediately the hammering of the ram reverberated through the gloom.
The alabarch understood. They were cracking the stone with fire and water and beating in the fractures with a ram.
Then the forty thousand within realized their extremity. The murmur increased to an even groan of terror, and here and there, as some more acutely realized the desperate straits, frantic screams would rive through the drone of misery.
Above it all the ram beat its sentence of doom upon the gate.
Splintering rock began to fall on the inner side of the assaulted portal. The keeper put his hands over his ears and turned away from the sight. Let but a breach be made wide enough to admit a hand to undo the bolts and hideous death would pour in upon the shuddering captives within.
Without, above the noise of the ram, the roar of the multitude continued:
"Give up the woman ere it is too late!"
Under the light of fires falling from above, hundreds of white faces in the mad mass turned toward Lydia.
A lozenge of stone large enough to admit a man's body shaped itself in the gate under the ram, and the next instant shot out and fell near the keeper. With it came a hoarse roar of triumph, drowning a scream of despair.
A dozen arms came through the opening and fumbled for the bolts.
The keeper seized the fragment of stone and hurled it at the intruding arms. It struck fair and with vicious force. Howls of pain went up.
The limp arms were dragged out and as others came in the keeper bounded to the gate and catching up his missile beat madly upon flesh and bone until the besiegers abandoned their search for the bolts.
The thunder of assault began again, for the gate could not hold long. The trapped victims shrieked and out of the mass fingers pointed at Lydia.
Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of the keepers of the unassaulted gates, she said to him:
"I am she whom they want without! Let me forth!"
A tall spare old man, one of the strangers who had entered last, approached her. But the girl motioned him aside and he made the sign of the cross over her.
Her father, watching her, did not realize until the keeper undid the bolts which held the wicket, or subsidiary gate in the large one, that Lydia meant to pass out into the night.
With a cry, he sprang after her.
A hush fell in the Synagogue.