On the ship wrecked between Crete and Malta, he recalled the prisoner of two years ago well enough; but he had kept himself out of sight from both prisoners and sailors all he could on that voyage, staying below deck on plea of seasickness by day and coming up only in the wild nights, when the high-rolling cape of his black cloak had hidden his face; and he could dream his dreams of awakening youth, and the message of hope his Princess’s black glance had thrown him when she slipped him the wallet of gold pieces from her litter chair and bade him “haste to Rome and wait there.”
Yet it had been no easy business for him “to haste to Rome,” for the merchant of Colossé to whom Agrippa in a moment of jealous suspicion had sold him had been an exacting master, and had set the new young slave to keeping accounts in the great warerooms. It had only been his knowledge of the Phrygian patois dialect, half Assyrian, half Greek, that had induced the merchant to send him to the seacoast and the Isles of the Sea to collect exchange on accounts. He had collected the accounts. Then he had taken ship at Crete and run away without a qualm. Why should he have qualms? Had he not been kidnapped by the robbers of Galilee and held for ransom, and, when the robbers were routed out by Felix, given as a slave—he, who came from the mountaineers who never had been slaves—to young King Agrippa and the sister, Bernice?
After that, life had become a golden dream of awakening youth. Though Bernice had been a wife to one Herod, and now was sent north to be wife to another old man, after the custom of the Herods to strengthen their thrones by marrying their daughters to powerful rulers, Bernice had been almost as young as he—she was barely twenty. He had been set at first to seeing that the Nubian slaves kept the royal baths at Cæsarea clean. Then in a fit of suspicion over having any but black eunuchs, who were mutes, attend the royal baths, Agrippa had sent him to keep the tracks of the chariot races powdered with soft sand to fill the wheel ruts and save the horses’ knees if a racer slipped on the swift course.
There he had gained the first glimpse of the Princess’s favor toward himself. She had been driving with her royal young brother in one of the trials for the chariot races. The snowy steeds of the young King’s chariot were given precedence of all others, the Festus’s wild Arab horses were champing the bits to pass, and the Roman had great ado to hold them behind Agrippa. A dozen other prancing teams were surging behind. She had worn a silver bangle round her brow to hold back her hair. On her brow hung a jade-stone ornament from Arabia with the swastika cross of luck beaded in gold. In the wild charge of the racers the jade pendant had bounced from its setting in the sand. Leaping in front of the other racers, the boy had rescued the emblem of good luck from trampling; and all the people in the seats of the great hippodrome had cheered his pluck. Fortune had come to him in the little jewel with the odd cross.
When the charioteers came round the course again, King Agrippa himself had stooped to receive the restored jewel; and the people had cheered again; and when Agrippa and Bernice had gone up to Daphne’s Gardens at Antioch, for the wild, lawless pleasures there, then had followed another golden dream of awakening youth. The boy did not know, when he had been with the royal lovers in Daphne’s Gardens, that only a few miles away was the Prophet, with the Christians of Antioch; and here they were, both thrown together in the evil snares of Rome.[[1]] Amid the roses and the palms and the love temples and the fountains of the gardens were artificial lakes, where plied boats with silken awnings rowed by Naiads in silver-and-golden nets to the music of zither and harp under the Moon Goddess.
| [1] | This is the only point in the boy’s story where there is any discrepancy between his experiences as told by himself and the sacred and profane writers of the period. It does not appear among the sacred writers whether the corn ships carrying the Prophet at the various ports of call delayed long enough for the prisoners to have gone in to Antioch, as they did at all the other ports where Christians dwelt; but in the profane writers of Rome and Greece at the period ’61 A.D. to ’68 A.D., are abundant proofs of all the youth’s adventures in Daphne’s Gardens; and Bernice’s record became an infamy in Rome. |
Here Agrippa and Bernice took their pleasure, and he, now the trusted page, accompanied them, as steersman for the nymphs. He was clad in silvered silks, the girl rowers in spangled nets, with naked limbs the color of pink shells. He knew that five hundred bastinadoes on the soles of his feet would be the punishment if ever he breathed a word of what he saw on these nights; and he saw nothing; but dipped his steersman paddle to the rhythm of the temple music, and watched the limpid water ripple in drops of moonlit gold, and dreamed his dreams of awakening youth, which are wiser than seers in their intuitions and stronger than breastplates of bronze in their innocence. He knew nothing going on around him because he saw nothing but Bernice’s eyes; and she was so far beyond his reach, he saw no spider net in those black, fathomless eyes.
And then one day crashed down his house of dreams in catastrophe about his youth. It had been a wild day of painted barges, of soothsayers, of magicians, of story-tellers, of dwarfs, of buffoons, of libations to Bacchus, and temple nymphs clad in golden gauze. The flesh of grown man did not live that could pass that day unscathed; and the page, who had been a mountain boy, knew naught of a goddess who could turn men to swine. There had been an older man with King Agrippa and his sister that day. The boy remembered afterward the older man had the face of one of the satyrs, half man, half goat, of whom his mountain tribes told.
There had been frenzied dancing in the love temples and more libations to Bacchus; but the mountaineers do not drink; and at the end of that day, to quiet evil tongues, Princess Bernice had been affianced to the King with the satyr face; and the star of the boy’s lamp had gone out in utter blackness, with his heart cold lead, till, passing from the love temple in her curtained, latticed litter, she had thrust out her hand to him in the dark and given him the purse of gold and bade him haste to Rome and meet her there, while she went to Jerusalem to pay a vow! He did not know the nature of that vow, though all the fashion of Rome was laughing over it, and poets made mock of it and actors in the theaters extemporized lines on “Bernice’s locks” and do to this day.
He knew with the knowledge of youth she had shaved her head and taken her vow to escape her elderly spouse; and now the rough Idumean guard had said all Rome was laughing at the way the sly maid had gone to Jerusalem but to throw her nymph net over Titus, son of Vespasian, who might become Emperor after Nero.