CHAPTER XXXIV.
The day following the three ruffians lingered about the site of the old Hippodrome—through the open space of which the citizens passed in going from one part of the city to another. Toward evening a stone was thrown against the bronze-sheathed column, or walled pyramid, which still held some of the great plates that in the palmy days of Byzantium made it one of the wonders of the city. It was the signal for alertness. A short-bodied, long-armed, red-haired man, dressed in the white kilt and gold-embroidered jacket of a citizen, sauntered leisurely through the Hippodrome. He measured with his eye the space which once blazed with the splendor of fashion, when, beneath the imperial eye of a Justinian or Theodosius, the horses of Araby and Thracia ran, and the factions of "the Blues" and "the Greens" shouted, and the whirling wheels of the golden chariots sprinkled the dust upon the multitudes.
The man paused to gaze at the bronze column of three intertwined serpents, with silver-crested heads, which was believed to have been brought from the temple at Delphi to his new city by the great Constantine. He stood reverently before the tall Egyptian obelisk of rose-granite, whose light red glowed with deeper hue in the eastern flush of the twilight sky; puzzled over its vertical lines of hieroglyphs which thirty centuries had not obliterated, and studied the figures on its marble base, representing the machines used by the engineers of Theodosius in hoisting the great monolith to its place, a thousand years ago. Broken statues—the spoil of conquered cities in generations of Greek prowess which shamed the supineness of the present, stood or lay about the grand pillar of porphyry, which was once surmounted by the statue of Apollo wrought by Phidias.
"Shame for such neglect!" muttered the man. "A people that cannot keep its art from cracking to pieces with age, cannot long keep the old empire of the Cæsars."
The narrow street to the north of the Hippodrome square shut out the remnant of daylight as the man turned into it. His attention was drawn by the groaning of some poor outcast crouching in the dark shadow of an angle in the wall. As he stooped to inspect this object a stunning blow fell upon his head. Two stalwart men instantly pinioned his arms. They rolled his helpless body a few yards, and carried or slid it down a flight of steps into a dark cavern, whose sides echoed their footfalls and whispers, as if it were the place of the last Judgment where the secrets of life are all to be proclaimed. Reaching the bottom, one of the men produced a light. The glare seemed to excavate a hollow sphere out of the thick darkness, but revealed nothing, except the spectral flash of the bats flitting around the heads of the intruders, and the damp earthen floor upon which the men had thrown their victim. At length great forms rose through the gloom, like the trunks of a forest. The water of a subterranean lake gleamed from near their feet, but its smooth black sheen was soon lost in the darkness. A small boat, or raft, was near, into which the man was lifted; one of the ruffians sitting on his feet, the other by his head, while the third propelled the craft by pushing against great granite pillars between which they passed. After going some distance the boat ground its bottom against a mass of fallen masonry and dirt, which made a sort of island, perhaps twenty feet across. Here they landed, and dragged their victim.
"What would you have with me?" said the prostrate man.
"It is enough that we have you," said Pedro, in broken Greek. "We want nothing more; not even to keep your miserable carcass, since we have already got our pay for burying it. I'll be your father-confessor and shrive you. If you like the Latin—Absolvo te! and away go your sins as easily as I can strip this gold-laced jacket off your back. Or if you prefer the Greek—By the horns of Nebuchadnezzar, I've forgotten the priestly words! But I'll shrive you all the same without the holy mumble. And if you want to pray a bit yourself, why fold your feet in front of your nose and kneel on your back."
"Why do you kill me?" said the man. "I am nothing to you."
"Nothing to us, but something to him who has hired us. As honest men we must do what we were paid to do."