‘Which is he?’
Julius pointed to a prisoner chained to the foremost soldier, on either side of whom nearly all the visitors were grouped, listening eagerly to every word he uttered, and showing him every sign of love and reverence. He was a man with the aquiline nose and features of his race, somewhat bent, somewhat short of stature, evidently from his gestures a man of nervous and emotional temperament. His hair had grown grey in long years of hardship. Many a care and peril and anxiety had driven its ploughshare across his brow. His cheeks were sunken, and the eyes, though bright, were disfigured by ophthalmia. He was evidently short-sighted, but as he turned his fixed and earnest look now on one, now on another of his companions, the expression of his deeply-marked face was so translucent with some divine light within, that those who once saw him felt compelled to look long on a countenance of no ordinary type of nobleness.
Titus gazed at him. Nothing could be more unlike the worn and weary Jew who had been buffeted by so many storms and escaped from so many terrific perils, than was the athletic young Roman, with his short fair hair which curled round a face ruddy in its prime of youth and health. In the prisoner’s aspect there was none of the Roman dignity which marked the look and bearing of Pætus Thrasea; none of the manly independence which looked the whole world in the face from the eyes of Cornutus or Musonius Rufus; none certainly of the rich Eastern beauty which marked Aliturus or the Herodian princes. Yet Titus as he watched him was, for a moment, too much astonished to speak.
‘He looks all you say of him,’ he murmured. ‘Who is he?’
‘His name is Paulus of Tarsus. He is evidently a great leader among these Christians.’
Hitherto Onesimus, absorbed in his own sad reflections, had neither heeded the throng, nor attended to the conversation between Titus and Julius. But suddenly he caught the name, and looked up with a hasty glance.
He saw before him not a few of the Christian community of Rome. Many of them were known to him. Nereus was there and Junia; and from the household of Cæsar he recognised Tryphæna and Tryphosa and Herodion; and there were Linus, and Cletus, and the soldiers Urban and Celsus, and Claudia Dicæosyne, wife of a freedman of Narcissus, and Andronicus, and Alexander, and Rufus, sons of Simon of Cyrene who had borne Christ’s cross, and many more.
In a single glance he took in the presence of these, and a sense of danger flashed across him, lest any one of them, perhaps a false brother, should penetrate his disguise as Titus had done. But it was not at them that he looked. His whole being was absorbed in the gaze which he fixed on him whom he had always heard spoken of as the Apostle Paulus.
Yes, there he stood; his face thinner and more worn than of old, his hair now almost white with an age which was reckoned less by years than by labours and sorrows; but otherwise just as he was when Philemon had gone from Colossæ and taken with him his boy-slave to listen to the words of impassioned reasoning and burning inspiration which Paul poured forth at Ephesus in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. What a flood of memories surged over the young Phrygian’s soul as he saw him! As though his life, since then, had been written in lightning, he thought in one instant of that long tale of shame and sorrow—from the theft at Colossæ to the wanderings with the priests of the Syrian goddess, the gladiators’ school, the attempted murder at Aricia. It all flashed upon his recollection, and he felt as if he could sink to the earth for shame. His first impulse was to spring forward and cast himself at the Apostle’s feet. But he heard Julius say that they had halted too long, and that he must press forward with his charge. The word ‘Forward, soldiers!’ was given, and Onesimus hid himself behind a tomb, only rejoining Titus when the Christians had passed by. Titus seemed lost in thought, but as they were near Pomponia’s house, he said:
‘Onesimus, did you see that prisoner?’