The proconsul waved his hand and the soldier withdrew.
CHAPTER XI
THE HOUSE OF DEFENSE
Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, the usurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation.
By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowed for foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About such a day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed.
Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed and turned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forget prayers.
It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he served was the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement of the white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigor of the Pharisee Saul, the naïve sophistication of the Romanized Herod had constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that the world's manner was either cultured or simple.
But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowing world, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself to control it.
It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in him that were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night his fingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room had become noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that had come and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what he had sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss he did not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had been bidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughness of his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was out of place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty.