"Put him off until you have consulted me. He is not a safe borrower."

CHAPTER IX

"--AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS!"

Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first floor of the alabarch's mansion. The hall was vacant and each of the chambers opening off it was silent, so he wandered through the whole length of the corridor, composedly as a master in his own house. No one did he see until he reached the end of the hall, when there appeared suddenly, as if materialized out of the gloom, the brown serving-woman. The olive-green of her immense eyes glittered in the light of a reed taper she bore. She stepped aside to let him pa.s.s and proceeded to light the lamps.

Agrippa stopped to look at her, simply because she was lithe and unusual, but she continued without heeding him. On one of the lamp-bowls the palm-oil had run over and the reed ignited it; but with her bare hand the woman damped it and went her way with a running flame flickering out on the back of her hand.

"Perpol!" the prince exclaimed to himself as he rambled on. "No wonder the phenix comes to Egypt to be born."

At the end of a corridor he pa.s.sed through an open door into a colonnade fronting a court-garden of extraordinary beauty. It was carpeted with sod, interlined with walks of white stone which led at every divergence to a cla.s.sic Roman exedra. The awning which usually sheltered the inclosure from the sun had been rolled up and the cooling sky bent loftily over it. The inert summer airs were heavy with the scent of lotus, red lilies and spice roses which were ma.s.sed in an oval bed in the center.

At that moment he caught sight of an indolent figure, half sitting, half lying in one of the sections of the exedra.

He knew at first glance that it was not the alabarch's daughter, and, remembering that his last glance in the mirror after his servant had done with him had shown him at his best, he moved without hesitation toward the unknown.

As he approached she raised her eyes and coolly scrutinized him. Her face, thus lifted for inspection, showed him a woman in the later twenties, and of that type which since the beginning could look men between the eyes. She was a Roman, but never in all the Empire were other eyes so black and luminous, or hair so glossy, or cheek so radiant. Her face was an elongated oval, topping a long round neck, which broadened at the base into a sudden and exaggerated slope of marble-white shoulders. The low sweep of the bosom, the girdle just beneath it, shortening the lithe waist, the slender hips, the long lazy limbs completed a perfect type, distinct and unlimited in its powers.

For a fraction of a second the two contemplated each other; perhaps only long enough for each to confess to himself that he had met his like. Then Agrippa came and sat down beside her, and she did not stir from her careless posture. So many, many of the kind had each met and known that they could not be strangers.

"The alabarch should turn his prospective son-in-law into his garden if he would speed the marrying of his daughter," the prince observed.

"He hath the daughter, the garden, and the notion to dispose of her,"

she answered, "but it is the son-in-law that is wanting."

"But in my long experience with womankind," he replied, "it would not seem improbable to believe that it is the lady and not the lover that makes the witchery of the garden a wasted thing. I have heard of unwilling maids."

"Unwilling in directions," she replied with a smile, "and under certain influences. For if there were any to withstand my conviction, I am ready to wager that there never lived a woman before whom all the world of men could pa.s.s without making her choice."

"And perchance," he said promptly, "if there were any to withstand my conviction, I would wager that there never lived a man before whom the world of women could pa.s.s without making his choice,--again and again!"

"Which declaration," she responded evenly, "publishes thee a married man; the single gallant declares only for one."

"O deft reasoning! it establishes thee a Roman. What dost thou here, in Alexandria where there is no court, no games, no senators, no Caesar--naught but riots and Jews?"

"Jews," she said, scanning a rounded arm to see if its rest on the back of the exedra had left a mark on it, "Jews are red-lipped, and eyed like heifers. Sometimes brawn and force weary us in Rome; wherefore we go into Egypt or the East to seek silky and subtle devilishness."

Agrippa moved along the exedra and looked into her eyes. He saw there that peculiar expression which he had expected to find. It was a set questioning, one that runs the scale from appeal to demand--the asking eye, the sign of continual consciousness of the woman-self and her charms.

"Why make the effort? Only tell us of the East that you want us and the East will come to you."

"What? Oriental love-philters, simitars, poisoning, silks and mysticism in the shadow of the Fora and within sound of the Senate-chamber? No, my friend; we must hear the lapping of the Nile or the flow of the Abana, behold camels and priests, and the far level line of the desert, while we languish on bronze bosoms and breathe musks from oriental lips."

"It is not then the Jews," he objected. "They are a temperate, a pa.s.sionless lot, that carry the Torah like hair-balances in their hearts to discover if any deed they do weighs according to the Law.

No, Jews are a straight people. Thou speakest of the--Arab!"

She turned her eyes toward him and measured his length, surveyed his slender hands, and glanced at the warm brown of his complexion.

"So?" she asked with meaning. "An Arab?"

He continued to smile at her.

"And every Jew is thus minded?" she asked, observing later the unmistakable signs of Jewish blood in his profile.

"Unless he is tinctured with the lawlessness of Arabia."

"Ah!" She moved her fan idly and looked up at the sky.

"It is then, of a truth, the Arab, we seek," she added presently. "The Arab that knows no manners but his fathers' manners; who eats, drinks, loves, hates and conquers after his own fashion."

"Without having seen Jerusalem, or Rome?" he asked.

"Rome!" she repeated, looking at him again. "Yes, without having seen Rome or Jerusalem or Alexandria."

Agrippa tilted his head thoughtfully.

"Then, it is good only for a time--for as long as the surfeit of civilization lasts--which lasts no longer the moment one realizes the Arab is not devoted to the bath and that he counts his women among his cattle!"

She laughed outright. "I remember thou didst indorse him not a moment since! Wherefore the change?"

"Refinement in all things! To get it into an Arab, he has to be modified by alien blood."

"A truce! I am in Alexandria; her poetic wickedness has not been entirely exhausted. I--meet new, desirable things--daily!"

Her fan was between them as she spoke and he took the stick of it just above where she held it and was putting it aside when the proconsul, resplendent in a tunic of white and purple, appeared in the colonnade.

Beside him was Cypros in her Jewish matron's dress.

Agrippa put the fan out of the way and made his answer.

"Forget not that the East, whether Arab or Alexandrian, is intense--once won. It might hara.s.s thee, if thou weariest of it, before it wearies of thee--even to the extreme of pursuing thee to Rome."

The proconsul and the princess approached. The deep-set eyes of the Roman wore a peculiarly satisfied look.

"Men seek for stray cattle in the fields of sweet gra.s.s, look for lost jewels in the wallets of thieves, and missing Herods in the company of beautiful women," he observed.

"It is good to have an established reputation, whether we be cattle or jewels or Herods," Agrippa laughed; "for, thou seest, we are disjointed and unsettled, seeing Flaccus now enduring a Jew, again attending a lady.

"Again," said the beauty, "we mark the work of circ.u.mstances, which led us into difference just now, O thou disputatious."

"Well said, Junia," the proconsul declared; "some ladies would make gallants out of the fiends! Know ye all one another?" the proconsul continued.

"Except my lovely neighbor," Agrippa replied.

"The Lady Junia, daughter of Euodus, who with her father hath been transplanted here from Rome."