“He says after you have seen him—what will you do? We Romans interfere not with Grecian laws in the independent cities. He does not want trouble over this. What will you do afterwards?”
“Tell him,” answered the Grecian girl, “I shall deliver myself to the Greek magistrate to-morrow morning to be burned in the hippodrome for disobeying my mother, and refusing to marry the man to whom she sold me.”
The guard heard the answer, put the great key in the cell lock and pushed open the creaking door. The two women passed in and the door locked behind them.
For a moment they could see nothing by the smoky light of the pine knot in the iron clamp of the wall except the silver beam of the moonlight breaking the dark through a casement window so deep you could only see the night sky outside as through a long high tube. There was the sound of breathing, and a man’s figure lay on a cot against the wall, with one arm and one foot padlocked to a staple in the stones. His head was pillowed on a folded black cloak and his forehead bound in a white cloth, where the rocks of the rioters had struck him, but the moonlight falling on his face and hands showed a curious luminous radiance and white peace. At first the Greek girl thought he was dead and her knees gave under her. Then, she heard his breathing and knew that he slept and was dreaming happy dreams, as children dream in peace, for the white face smiled in its sleep.
The Greek girl’s eyes closed and her lips moved in prayer. Yet she hardly knew how or to whom to pray; for in the temples of Iconium there were only statues of the goddess Venus, or Diana, or the Roman emperors; and she had never before prayed to an Unknown, Invisible God. Her serving woman fell to her knees and began to wail aloud, swaying her body to and fro after the manner of the Blacks. When Thecla opened her eyes from an almost inarticulate prayer, she saw the prisoner sitting up on his cot.
“Child—how came—you here?”
She told him in a few words.
“Have you counted the cost?”
“No cost can be too great,” she said.
He smiled quietly as though he had not been mobbed and stoned by a riotous rabble but a few hours before.