The quenchless light

by Agnes C. Laut

Her foot tripped. ’Twas but the plundered gold of the Temple chests, she knew by the rattle of coin on stone; and she sped on through the dark. Then an odor struck her in the face that is like no other odor on earth. It was the odor of those long dead in damp. She swayed faint against the circular arch of the Aqueduct and like a flash in the night came memory of the tales of long ago—these were the high priests that Herodias’ lord had spurred to crucify the Christus of the Nazarenes. Her breath came in gasps. Was she to perish here haunted forever by that Christian cross, which the line of Herods had risked all to destroy in order to perpetuate a crumbling kingdom? Her sandal touched a soft and naked thing. She leaped over the tangled mass of unseen putrid flesh and ran till her forward right hand touched bronze gate beneath the Towers of Herod’s Palace.

Three raps she gave, and then four, in the mystic number of the Hebrew seven. It was the Roman pass to deceive the Jews in their own mystic number. No answering sound came back.

She rapped again, three—then four—louder and yet louder and could hear her own muffled heart beats in the dark.

Had the old Idumean, whom she had tricked, perished trapping her in revenge? Her heart beat till she thought her temples would burst; and she saw as in colored fires the bloody head of the Hermit John, who had taunted Herodias to madness; the ghostly wraith of Mariamne, Herod’s murdered wife; the pale face of the Nazarene, James, whom her own Herod husband had ordered stoned to death—then circles of fire went whirling before her eyes and in the circles a fiery cross with the crucified figure of that Son of Man—she screamed and beat on the bronze door with her hands.

It seemed a century before seven faint taps sounded back from the other side of the door.

She rapped again frantically, beating the door with her clenched fist and screaming “ ’Tis I—Princess Bernice—open—open—open the doors! For the love of God, open the doors.”

Then she sank to her knees, with the fiery circles whirling in her dying consciousness, and in the midst of the circles ever the dangling figures of crucified men on a wall. The bronze door creaked, and rasped, and swung open. A Roman soldier, wan with hunger, stood in the dim light. He fell back as if from a ghost and would have clashed the bronze door shut; but she thrust the pass from Titus in his amazed hand and fainted across the threshold at his feet.

Must a woman ever pass through the portals of hell to gain her end?

She risked her mother’s life in gaining birth. She risked her own in giving birth; and was this the end? Why was woman accursed? Was there no redemptive power in all the long chain of circumstances to free her from the power of that ancient curse for grasping at the Tree of Life? What was life? ’Twas life she had snatched at and lo! a flaming sword of fire—circles of fire and in the center ever the cross of a crucified love. Then, in her delirium, Onesimus, her lover, was bending over her in the Garden of Ardath, the Paradise of Flowers; and every flower was a child’s soul; and through her veins ran a flame that did not burn but was of the very essence of light; and at her feet lay no Dead Sea of tears but ran with the laughing glad voice of many waters Rivers of Life—and their vesture was of the light of the very sun. They did not need to speak. They knew without words.

The flame was no longer fiery sword—it was golden light; and her lover was trying to tell her that light was love, golden as the dawn over the swimming mountains of Moab—over which they two seemed mounting in chariots of fire—when an unseen hand, white as fuller’s earth, snatched him from her—and she was falling—falling—falling—sinking with the dead weight of her humanity straight to that Dead Sea of tears—the laughter now was not the glad voice of many waters—it was the shrieking mockery of the Roman world. She was marching with ball on feet and gyves on wrists under the Triumphal Arch of Rome; and all Rome was pointing fingers of scorn at the naked captive daughter of the Herod kings; and the rabble dogs were snapping at the captive lines. She awakened with a piercing scream.