CHAPTER XXV.
That night the palace of Herod the tetrarch resounded with music, and all the persons of rank or distinction in Jerusalem were among the guests. The entertainment would have been remembered for years on account of its brilliancy; it was destined to be remembered for all ages, even till the day of doom, on account of its catastrophe, chronicled in the books of God, and graven in the horror of men.
Paulus, unusually grave, because experiencing unwonted sensations, and anxious calmly to analyze them, was assailed for the first time in his life by a feeling of nervous irritability, which originated (though he knew it not) in his having suppressed the natural desire to chastise the insolence of Caiaphas that morning. He sat abstracted and silent, not far from the semi-royal chair of Herod the tetrarch. His magnificent dress, well-earned military fame, and manly and grave beauty (never seen to greater advantage than at that period of life, though the gloss of youth was past) had drawn toward him during the evening an unusual amount of attention, of which he was unconscious, and to which he would have been indifferent.
The "beauty of the evening," as she was called (for in those days they used terms like those which we moderns use, to express our infatuation for the gleams of prettiness which are quenched almost as soon as they are seen), had repeatedly endeavored to attract his attention. She was royal; she was an unrivalled dancer. Herod, who began to feel dull, begged her to favor the company with a dance, sola. Thereupon the daughter of Herodias looked at Paulus, to whom her previous blandishments had been addressed in vain (he was well known to be unmarried), and heaved a fiery sigh. The mere noise of it ought to have awakened his notice, and yet failed to accomplish even that small result. Had it succeeded, he was exactly the person to have regarded this woman with a feeling akin to that which, some two-and-twenty years before, she herself (or was it Herodias? they age fast in the East) had waked in the bosom of his sister under the veranda in the bower of Crispus's inn, leading out of the fine old Latian garden near the banks of the Liris.
She proceeded to execute her ballet, her pas seul, her dance of immortal shame and fatal infamy. Cries of delight arose. The creature grew frantic. The court of Herod fell into two parties. One party proclaimed the performance a perfection of elegance and spirit. The other party said not a word, but glances of painful feeling passed among them. The clamorous eulogists formed the large majority. In the silent minority was numbered Paulus, who never in his life had felt such grave disgust or such settled indignation. He thought of his pure and innocent Esther—alas, not his! He thought that, had it been his sister Agatha who thus outraged every rudimentary principle of the tacit social compact, he could almost find it in his heart to relieve the earth of her.
Thus pondering, his glance fell upon Herod the tetrarch. The tetrarch seemed to have become delirious. He was laughing, and crying, and slobbering, and clapping his hands, and rolling his head, and rocking his body on the great state cushion under the canopy, where he "sat at table." While Paulus was contemplating him in wonder and shame, the wretched dancer came to an end of her bounds. Indecency, scientifically accidental, had been the one simple principle of the exhibition. Herod called the practised female before him, and, in the hearing of several, bade her demand from him any reward she pleased, and declared upon oath that he would grant her demand. Paulus heard the answer. After consulting apart with her mother, she reapproached the tetrarch, and, with a flushed face, said that she desired the head of a prisoner upon a dish.
"What prisoner?"
"John," said she.
Paulus gazed at the miserable tetrarch, "the quarter of a king," not from the height of his rank as a Roman general, but from the still greater height which God had given him as one of the first, one of the earliest of European gentlemen. He knew not then who John was. But that any fellow-creature in prison, not otherwise to be put to death, should have his head hewn off and placed upon a dish, because a woman had tossed her limbs to and fro in a style which pleased a tetrarch while it disgraced human society, appeared to Paulus to be less than reasonable. What he had said, the tetrarch had said upon oath.
A little confusion, a slight murmuring and whispering ensued, but the courtly music soon recommenced. Paulus could not afterward tell how long it was before the most awful scene he had ever witnessed occurred.
A menial entered, bearing, on a large dish, a freshly-severed human head, bleeding at the neck.
"It was not a jest, then," said Paulus, in a low voice to his next neighbor, a very old man, whose face he remembered, but whose name he had all the evening been trying in vain to recall—"it was not a base jest, dictated by the hideous taste of worse than barbarians!"
"Truly," replied the aged man, "these Jews are worse than any barbarians I ever saw, and I have seen most of them."
Paulus recognized at these words the geographer Strabo, formerly his companion at the court of Augustus.
At a sign from Herod, the menial carrying the dish now approached the daughter of Herodias, and presented to her the bleeding and sacred head. She, in turn, took the dish and offered it to Herodias, who herself bore it out of the room with a kind of snorting laugh.
Paulus rose slowly and deliberately from his place near the tetrarch, at whom he steadily looked.
"This, then," said he, "is the entertainment to which you have invited a Roman legatus. You are vexed, people say, that Pilate, the Roman governor of this city, could not honor your birthday by his presence in your palace. Pilate's local authority is of course greater than mine, for I have none at all; but his real, permanent rank, and your own real, permanent importance, are contemptible by the side of those which a Roman soldier of such a family as the Æmilian has gained on the field of battle; and it was a high honor to yourself to succeed in bringing me hither. And now, while disgracing your own house, you have insulted your guests. What is the name of the man you have murdered because a woman dances like a goat? What is his name?"
The tetrarch, astonished and over-awed, replied with a bewildered look:
"What authority to rebuke me, because I took my brother's wife, had John?"
"John who?" asked Paulus, who from the outset had been struck by the name.
"He who was styled John the Baptist," said the tetrarch.
The words of another John rang in Paulus's memory; and he exclaimed:
"What! John the Baptist? John the Baptist, yea, and more than a prophet—John the Angel of God! Is this he whom you have slain?"
"What had he to say to my marriage?" answered Herod, through whose purple face a livid under-color was penetrating to the surface.
"Why," exclaimed Paulus, "the holy books of your own nation forbade such a marriage, and John could not hear of it without rebuking you. I, although a Gentile, honor those books. Out upon you, impious assassin! I ask not, where was your mercy, or where your justice; but where has been your sense of common decency, this evening? I shall never cease to lament that I once stood under your roof. My presence was meant as an honor to you; but it has proved a disgrace to myself."
Taking his scarlet cloak, he flung it over his shoulders, and left the hall amid profound silence—a silence which continued after he had quitted the courtyard, and begun to descend from Mount Zion to the labyrinth of streets branching downward to the Tyropæon Valley. In one of these, under a bright moonlight, he met again that same beautiful youth whom he had seen in the morning when he was descending the Mount of Olives.
"Stay!" cried Paulus, suddenly stopping in his own rapid walk. "Said you not, this morning, that he who was called 'John the Baptist' was more than a prophet? Herod has this moment slain him, to please a vile woman. The tyrant has sent the holy prophet out of life."
"Nay; into life," replied the other John; "but, brave and noble Roman—for I see you are both—the Master, who knows all things, and rejoices that John has begun to live, grieves as well."
"Why grieves?" inquired Paulus, musing.
"Because," replied the other John, "the Master is verily man, no less than He is Who is."
"What, then, is he?" asked Paulus, with a look of awe.
"He is the Christ, whom John the Prophet, now a witness unto death, had announced."
Hereupon the two went their several ways, Paulus muttering: "The second name in the acrostic."
But, really, he had ceased to care for minor coincidences in a huge mass of convergent proofs all gaining possession of his soul, and taking alike his will and his understanding captive—captive to the irresistible truth and the equally irresistible beauty of the message which had come. The immortality of which he was an heir, the reader has seen him long since believing; and long since also rejecting both the pantheism of the philosophers and the polytheism of the vulgar. And here was a great new doctrine authoritatively establishing all that the genius of Dionysius had guessed, and infinitely more; truths awful and mysterious, which offered immediate peace to that stupendous universe that is within a man, while assuring him of power, joy, and honor to begin some day, and nevermore to end.
He had not been in Jerusalem long before he learnt much of the new teaching. He had secured for his mother, close to the Fortress Antonio, where he himself lodged, a small house belonging to a widow who, since her husband's death, had fallen into comparative poverty. The Lady Aglais, attended still by her old freedwoman, Melena, was allowed the best and coolest part of this house entirely to herself, with a staircase of their own leading to the flat roof. There they passed much of their evenings after the sun had set, looking at the thickly-built opposite hills, the mansions on Zion, or down into the Tyropæon from which the hum of a great multitude came, mellowed by the distance, and disposing the mind to contemplation. Many wonderful things, from time to time, they heard of him who was now teaching—things some of which, nay, the greater part of which, as one of the sacred writers expressly declares, never were recorded, and the whole of which could not be contained in the libraries of the world. It may well, then, be imagined in what a situation Paulus and his mother were—having no interest in disbelieving, no chair of Moses to abdicate, no doctorial authority or pharisaic prestige inciting them to impugn the known truth—in what a situation they were, for accepting or declining what was then offered.
After twenty years of separation, a trace of Esther had been recovered by Paulus. One evening, his mother was on the flat roof of her residence awaiting his customary visit, when her son appeared and alarmed her by his pallor. He had seen Esther on foot in a group of women at the Gate of Gennath, going forth into the country, as he was entering the city on horseback. Aglais smiled sadly, saying: "Alas! dear son, is that all? I long since knew that she still lived; but I would not disturb your mind by the useless intelligence."
"Scarcely altered," murmured Paulus abstractedly, "while I am quite old. Yes, she must now be past thirty; yes, near thirty-five."
"As to that," said the mother, "you are thirty-eight, and scarcely seem twenty-nine. Old Rebecca, the mistress of this house, who lives still in the ground-story, as you are aware, has told me much about Esther."
"She is married, I suppose," said Paulus, with a look of anxiety.
"No," replied Aglais. "She has had innumerable offers (spite of her comparative poverty), and has declined them all."
"But what boots it?" exclaimed Paulus.
"Old Josiah Maccabeus is dead," said Aglais. And here mother and son dropped the subject by mutual consent.
The dreadful days, closed by the most awful day the world has known—closed by the ever-memorable and tremendous Friday—came and went. On the Saturday, Paulus met Longinus, who said he had been on Mount Calvary that afternoon, and that he, Longinus, was now and ever henceforth a disciple of him who had been crucified. The Sunday came, and brought with it a prodigious rumor, which, instead of dying out, found additional believers every day. The disciples, most of whom had shown themselves as timid as they were known to be ignorant, now seemed transformed into new characters, who loudly affirmed that their Master had risen from the dead by his own power; and they were ready to face every torment and all terrors calmly in the maintenance of this fact, which they predicted would be received and acknowledged by the whole world. And, indeed, it was no longer a rumor, but a truth, attested by the only witnesses who could by possibility know anything about it, either for or against; and whose earthly interests it would have been to deny it, even while they knew it to be true—witnesses who, if they knew it to be false—and they certainly knew whether it were true or false (this much was granted, and is still granted, by all their opponents)—could have had no motive, either earthly or unearthly, for feigning that they believed it.
So pregnant is this simple reasoning, that a man might ponder it and study it for a whole month, and yet find fresh strength and an ever-increasing weight in the considerations which it suggests; not even find a flaw if he made the one month twelve. Paulus's mind was determined, and so was his mother's. The son sought that same beautiful youth whom he had seen twice before; told him the new desire, the new belief, which had made his mother's and his own heart glad; and by him they were baptized as Christians, disciples of him that had been crucified—by that fair youth, I say, who was to be known for ever among men as "Saint John the Evangelist."
"After all, mother," said Paulus, when they were returning together to her dwelling, "it is not so very mysterious; I mean that difficulty about the lowliness of our divine Teacher's chosen place among men. Because, see you, if the builder of those glorious stars and that sublime firmament was to come at all amongst us, he would be certain to take the lowest and smallest lot, lest we should deem there was any difference as before him. We are all low and small together—the earth itself, I am told, being but a sort of Bethlehem among the stars; but, anyhow, we are but mites and emmets on a blade of grass in his sight, and had he taken a great relative place amidst us, it might countenance the lie and the delusion of our silly pride. That part of it is to me not so mysterious, although I don't wonder at the Jewish notion that their Messiah was to have been a great conquering prince—that is probably what the Antichrist will be. It would suit the blindness of vanity better."
As he spoke the words, they heard a quick footstep behind, and were overtaken by Longinus, who, saying he had just heard of their reception, greeted them with every demonstration of rapturous affection.
"Now," pursued he, walking by their side, "good for evil to Master Paulus's family. Forgive the apparent intrusion, dear general, if I mention that I happen to know the story of your youthful love, as all the world have witnessed your fidelity to an unavailing attachment. But learn from poor Longinus that Esther Maccabeus is now a disciple; and the Christian maiden can wed, under a still holier law, the brave Gentile whom the Jewess was bound to refuse."
With this he turned into an alley under the court of the Gentiles, and disappeared.