Remembering Eleazar's statement concerning the breadth of the schism, Marsyas was prepared to discover the alabarch a Nazarene.
"O Israel! after triumph over the oppression of the mighty, is this your overthrow?" he said bitterly to himself.
Long before he reached the alabarch's house, the figure in his arms stirred and made a little questioning sound. But against her manifest wish, the promptings of his Essenic training and the admission that she had been overtaken among apostates, something in him locked his arms about her and brought a single word to his lips. The gentleness of his voice surprised him.
"Peace," he said, and she lay still.
After he had said it, a sudden rage against Eutychus seized him. The charioteer's part in the pursuit of the fugitive apostates assumed a brutality and an enormity many times greater than it had originally seemed. He took savage pleasure in anticipating turning over the culprit to Agrippa for justice.
He was led presently into a dark porch and admitted into a hall. The startled porter glanced at him, and, seeing Lydia in the stranger's arms, the serving-man cried out. The brown woman answered with a guttural sentence or two, and by the time Marsyas, following the lead of the agitated porter, entered a beautiful chamber, people were running in from brilliantly-lighted apartments beyond.
The spare and elegant old figure in the embroidered robes and cap of a Jewish magistrate hurried toward him with terror written on his face.
"Lydia! What hath befallen thee? Is she dead?" he cried.
Back of him came a rush of people. Foremost was Herod Agrippa; behind him, Cypros. With the growing group, Marsyas ceased to note the details of their identity and remarked at random that one was a man who wore a fillet and that the other was a woman and beautiful.
The number of servants increasing, the babble of questions and exclamations creating a great confusion, none who made answer was heard. But Marsyas looked at the master of the house. He saw this time, not the magistrate's alarm, but his character, his nationality, his religion. In that aristocratic old countenance there was nothing of the Nazarene. Marsyas let his eyes fall on the face against his breast. By the brighter light, he saw now that which he had not seen under the smoky street-torch. In the folds of her white dress, beautiful and rich enough for a feast, reposed a small cedar cross, depending from a scarlet cord.