"There is none nearer."

"My servants were bred to the desert; they are ill mountaineers. Thou wilt show them the way?"

"They can not lose the way," Marsyas protested; "it is the flock's well and all the hill paths lead to it. Think not ill of me, that I can not go, for I am in haste."

The old man smiled a little.

"An Essene, and he will not stop to give an old man water?"

Marsyas frowned resentfully, but turned to the servant at hand.

"Get thy fellows and the water-skins and follow!"

He turned off the Roman road and struck into the hills to the west.

The servitors of the Alexandrian caught up amphoras and hastened after him.

In less than an hour he reappeared before the man under the fringed tent.

"Thy servants are returned. Peace and farewell."

"Nay, but it is the noon. Wilt thou not tarry and rest?"

"I go," Marsyas said resolutely, "to save a life."

"Ah, then I did wrong to delay thee! I remember that Essenes are physicians."

"We can not cure the wicked of their evil intent, so I haste to save one threatened with another's malice. My friend is in peril. I must go unto Nazareth and return unto Jerusalem, before I can save him. And even now I may be too late!"

The magistrate searched the young man's face and then the half-incredulous curiosity pa.s.sed out of his manner.

"Pardon mine idle wasting of thy precious minutes," he said soberly.

"Go, and the Lord speed thee!"

Marsyas bowed low, and keeping his eyes fixed on the gray earth, lest they stray in search of the flower face, he turned again toward Nazareth. He heard a very soft, very hurried and almost imperious whisper, as he moved away, but he knew that it was not for him to hear, and he did not tarry. But a word from the magistrate brought him up.

"Stay! It is not customary for any outside of thine order to offer an Essene a.s.sistance, since we would spare thee the pain of refusal.

But--it hath been suggested that thy haste may permit thee to waive thy scruples and accept help from me--as it hath been suggested--I filched precious time from thee. Thou canst ride with us, if thou wilt, and take my daughter's camel. She will come with me."

The brilliant eyes no longer obeyed the restraint which would keep them from the flower face. He turned to the girl, shyly withdrawn under the shade of the fringed tent, and knew by the lowered eyes and the warmer flush mantling the cheek that it was she that had made these suggestions.

Twenty reasons why he should accept the magistrate's offer arose to combat the single stern admonition of Custom. He was not yet under the Essenic vow to accept hospitality from none but Essenes, though he had lived in its observance all his life; he could not reach Nazareth under a day's journey and these swift beasts could carry him into the village by midnight. And Stephen's life depended on it.

"We depart even now," the magistrate added, "and I promise thee no further delay."

Ancient usage accused the young man on account of the woman, but by this time she had arisen and pa.s.sed out of his sight, as if in good faith that he should not be troubled by her presence.

"Thou yieldest me invaluable aid," he said in a lowered tone, "and since I am not an elected Essene, but a ward of the brotherhood and a postulant, I am free and most glad to have thy help. Be thou blessed."

The magistrate acknowledged the young man's acceptance by a wave of a withered white hand and the slaves made the camels ready to proceed.

At midnight, the rocking camels sped without apparent weariness up the uneven streets of Nazareth, white under the stars. At the lewen of the single khan, the drivers drew up and Marsyas alighted to go forward and thank his host, but the magistrate slept, even while his servants lifted him down from the howdah. As he turned away, regretfully, he confronted the veiled girl, almost childlike in stature under the protection of her tall handmaiden. She dropped her head modestly and moved aside to let him pa.s.s, but he hesitated, and stopped. Few indeed had been the words he had addressed to women in his lifetime, and now his speech was more than ever unready.

"Thy father sleeps, yet I would not depart with my thanks unsaid. Be thou the messenger and give him my grat.i.tude when he waketh."

"It shall be my pleasure," she answered softly, "and may thy hopes come to pa.s.s. Farewell."

"Thou hast my thanks. The peace of the Lord G.o.d attend thee.

Farewell."

CHAPTER III

THE FIRST MARTYR

Mid-March in Judea was the querulous age of the young year. It was a time of a tempered sun and intervals of long rains and chill winds.

Under such persuasion, the rounded hills which upbore and encompa.s.sed Jerusalem took on a coat green as emerald and thick as civet-fur.

Above it the leaning cedars, newly-tipped with verdure, spread their peculiar flat crowns like ancient hands extended in benediction over the soil. Shoals of wild flowers, or rather flowers so long in fellowship with the fields of Palestine as to become domesticated, were scarlet and gold in shallows of green. Almond orchards snowed in the valleys and every wrinkle and crevice in the hills trickled with clear cold water. The winds whimpered and had the snows of Lebanon yet in mind; the days were not long and the sun shone across vales filled with undulating vapors, smoky and illusory.

The shade was not comfortable and within doors those apartments which denied entrance to the sun had to be made tenantable by braziers.

Loiterers, wayfarers and outcasts betook themselves to protected angles and sat blinking and comatose in the benevolent warmth of the sun.

It was late afternoon and without the cedar hedge of Gethsemane, where the ancient green wall cut off the streaming wind, was a group sitting close together on the earth.

One, much covered in garments barbarously striped, and who bestirred long meager limbs now and then, was an Arab. Next to him a Jewish husbandman from Bethesda squatted awkwardly, the length of his coa.r.s.e smock troubling him, while his hide sandals had been put off his hard brown feet. His neighbor was a Damascene, and two or three others sat about two who were employed in the center of this racial miscellany.

One of these was a Greek, the ruin of a Greek, not yet thirty and bearing, in spite of the disfigurement of degradation, solitary evidences of blood and grace. Opposite him sat a Roman, in a scarlet tunic.

The two were playing dice, but the end of the game was in sight, for the neat pile of sesterces beside the Roman was growing and the Greek had staked his last on the next throw.

Presently the Greek took the tesserae and threw them. The Roman glanced at the numbers up and smiled a little. The Greek scowled.

"The old defeat," he muttered. "Fortune perches on the standards of Rome even in a game of dice. Oh, well, we have had our day!"

The Roman stowed away the sesterces in a wallet and hung it again inside his tunic.

"Yes, you have had your day," he replied. "Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea--in my philosophy you can afford to lose a game of dice to a wolf-suckled Roman!"

The Greek sat still with his chin upon his breast, and the Roman, getting upon his feet, scrutinized the sluggish group of on-lookers.

His interest was not idle curiosity in the men. Such as they were to be seen c.u.mbering the markets and streets of Jerusalem by day or by night throughout the year. They were types of that which the world calls the rabble--at once a strength and a destruction, a creature or a master, as the inclination of its manipulators is or as the call of the situation may be. Individually, it has a mind; collectively, it has not; at all times it is a thing of great potentialities overworked, and of great needs habitually ignored. That the man in scarlet should scan each one of these, as one appraises another's worth in drachmae, was a natural proceeding, old as the impulse in the shrewd to prey upon the unwary. Out of this or that one, perhaps he could turn an odd denarius at another game of dice.

But when he looked reflectively at the west, where the broad brow of the hills was outlined against a great radiance, he calculated on the hour of remaining daylight and the distance from that point to another in Bezetha far across Jerusalem, and felt of his wallet.

It was bulky enough for one day's winnings, and entirely too bulky to be lost to some of the criminals or vagrants that would walk the night.

With a motion of his hand he saluted the defeated Greek and the gaping group which sat in its place and watched him, and turned down the Mount toward Jerusalem.

To a casual observer it would appear that he was a Roman. He wore the short garments characteristic of the race, was smooth-shaven, and displayed idolatrous images on his belt, and, in disregard of Judean custom, uncovered his head. But his features under a.n.a.lysis were Arabic, modified, not by the solidity of Rome but by the grace of the cla.s.sic Jew.