He resolved that he had been a fool long enough. He would give up the vain effort to conform, and would take Charity without sanction. He was impatient to go to her then and there, but he dared not approach her till she had rested.
He remembered a book he had picked up at one of their villages of denial. It was one of those numberless books everybody is supposed to have read. For that reason he had found it almost impossible to begin. But he was desperate enough to read even a classic. He hoped that it would be a soporific. That was his definition of a classic.
The book was the Reverend Charles Kingsley's Hypatia. Jim was down on the Episcopal clergy one and all, and he read with prejudice, skipping the preface, of course, which set forth the unusual impulse of a churchman to help the Church of his own day by pointing out the crimes and errors of the Church of an earlier day; a too, too rare appeal to truth for the sake of salvation by the way of truth.
As Jim glanced angrily through the early pages, the pictures of life in the fifth century caught and quickened his gritty eyes. He skimmed the passages that did not hold him, but as the hours went on he grew more unable to let go.
The sacred lunch hour passed by ignored. The rain beat down on the roof as the words rained up from the page. The character of that eminently wise and beautiful and good Hypatia seemed to be Charity in ancient costume. The hostility of the grimy churchmen of that day infuriated him. He cursed and growled as he read.
The persecution of Hypatia wrought him to such wrath that he wanted to turn back the centuries and go to her defense. He breathed hard as he came to the last of the book and read of the lynching of Hypatia, the attack of the Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her exquisite body through the streets, and even into the church, and up to the altar, up to the foot of “the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing—or a curse?”
Jim panted as Philammon did, tracing her through the streets by the fragments of her torn robes and fighting through the mob in vain to reach her and shield her. He became Philammon and saw not words on a page, but a tragedy that lived again.
She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around—shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing—and who dare say, in vain?—from man to God.
Her lips were opened to speak; but the words that should have come from them reached God's ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again ... and then wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs and thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philammon's ears.
Crushed against a pillar, unable to move in the dense mass, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over His head was written in the rainbow, “I am the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever!” The same as He was in Judea of old, Philammon? Then what are these, and in whose temple? And he covered his face with his hands, and longed to die.