"I shall not answer for thee," Eleazar went on, "but thou and the world accuse the innocent of Israel, when contempt is cast upon the race, as an entirety. But the slander of Israel hath been accomplished, even before Saul, and ye may not run down a lie. So thou and I and our kind have the hard task of upholding the glory of the people, a labor from which there can be no let nor eas.e.m.e.nt! The mult.i.tude which crowns to-day and crucifies to-morrow establishes no standard. But they are witnesses to the evil-speaking of the enemy; they are a slander which may not be denied. If thou join thyself with them, Marsyas, for thine own ends, in that much thou ungirdest Israel!"

"Brother, Saul of Tarsus consented unto the death of Stephen, and despoiled me of my one love, as an Essene; he proceedeth, now, against my beloved, as a man of the world! I can not wait on conscience and the welfare of Judea. She will not defend mine own; wherefore I must defend them, at whatever cost!"

Eleazar's face had grown inexpressibly sad during Marsyas' words. His heavily-shaded eyes turned absently away from the speaker. He seemed to see beyond the invincible walls and towers of the Holy City, even beyond the olive-orchards and the meeting of the earth and sky, into the time which would come out of the east.

Perhaps he saw waste and desolate places, lands of destruction and captives of the mighty, dregs of the cup of trembling and dregs of the cup of fury and the hostility of all nations. The sadness in his eyes became fixed.

"Verily," he said, as if speaking of his own visions, "thou art a G.o.d that hidest thyself, O G.o.d of Israel!"

Marsyas heard him with a stir of emotion in his soul. He put out his hand to the rabbi.

"If I and my like be wrong, thou shall prevail, when the day of the just man comes, in the Lord's time!"

"He called us His chosen people," Eleazar continued, suffering Marsyas to take his hand unnoticed, "even the appointed people, the marked people! Marked for His own purposes, how hidden! But what knows the clay of the potter's intent that pa.s.ses it through fire? Chastening or vengeance, woe, woe unto them, by whom it cometh!"

He turned away, and Marsyas looked after him until the narrow winding streets had obscured him.

Quickly then Marsyas continued toward the Gennath Gate; reared to the Essenic habit of traveling without preparation, he was ready to journey from city to city in the dress he wore on the streets.

He went by the cenotaph of Mariamne, past Phasaelus, past the Praetorium, out of the gate, past the might of Hippicus, and on to the parting of the road, where he took the way to Damascus.

Presently he met a horseman and, stopping the traveler, bought without parley the beast, and mounted it. He knew that Saul would proceed by the slow mule, and the forbidden, n.o.bler animal, the horse, would soon make up the distance the Pharisee had gained.

So, without relaxing from his fever of determination, Marsyas sped on toward Damascus.

He knew that the hour had come!

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

ON THE DAMASCUS ROAD

With the solid soil of the ancient Roman road beneath his horse's feet, Marsyas rode north, between the hills of Judea, with the head of Mt.

Ephraim before him. The early morning of the second day broke over him, fresh on the long straight road, leading over the border into Samaria, past the Well of Jacob, and through the city of Samaria. At noon the third day he turned at the parting of the ways, and rode east, along the southern edge of the Plains of Esdraelon, until, through a crevice in the hills, he saw the Jordan sparkling in its valley below.

It was an old familiar way, thence, north once more, fording a hundred mountain brooks that fed the river of the Holy Land. The narrow fertile strip that lay between the hills and waters of the Sea of Galilee, unto Tiberias, he accomplished after night. At dawn he entered Magdala, at mid-morning Capernaum, and, leaving the margin of the beautiful lake, he pa.s.sed north into the rocks, ridges and forests once more. Through marshes and sedge, with the waters of the Jordan in the heart of it, he forded the south arm of Lake Huleh and entered Itrurea.

The country changed but the road did not. It was still the same compact ribbon of stone and soil in the marsh as it was in the hills, as it was in the fertile lowlands. Ahead of him, through the hills it stretched, through the oaks of Bashan, under cliffs surmounted by castles, or hillsides marked by temples. And when the oaks left off, and the hills fell back and the streams dried into dead, sapless beds watered only by infrequent rains, the road continued on.

The fifth dawn, he rode down a pa.s.s, through a rocky defile, and the Syrian desert was before him.

He had bought provisions for two days' journey at the last village in the fertile lands; his horse was freshened after a night's feeding on the herbage in the hills, and Marsyas' heart was resolute.

Even the road no longer led him on, but he touched his horse with his hand and pa.s.sed into the wilderness.

At a huddle of huts for goat-tenders, he found that Saul and his party had pa.s.sed at noon the day previous. The Arabs there besought him to remain until the evening, for none traveled under a Syrian noonday and escaped evil consequences. But Marsyas wrapped his head in his mantle, watered his horse and pressed on. He had no time to lose.

The Antiliba.n.u.s, a glaring ridge of chalk, heightened at intervals into peaks that held up their blistering cold winds from the heat-blasted day, and swept them down by night to confound the stunned earth with ice. The shale from their easternmost slopes sprawled out on the desert and scarred it with rock and gravel until the blowing sands buried it. Far to the east, the lap of the desert dropped down into emptiness, marked by a level of intervening atmosphere. Beyond that were bald hills outlined against the horizon.

Between was a cruel waste, tufted here and there by gray-green, scrubby growth, half-buried in sand and rooted in gravel. There was color, but it was the dye of chemicals, not refractions; chalks, not rainbows.

The drop of water has only the true range of the spectrum and its merging grades, but sands may be erratic, chaotic. Thus, the wadies, sallow meanderings in the trembling distance, were bordered with dull fawn and dull lavender--ashes of scarlet and purple; wherever hummocks arose there were ground-swells of lifeless gray and saffron--burned-out blue and gold. Over it all were sown burnished fleckings of myriads of mica particles, like white-hot motes from the face of the sun itself.

The air was flame; the sky a livid arch that no man dared look upon.

At high noon, Marsyas hid from the deadly sun in a crevice in a narrow canyon; but pressed on while yet the scorching air burned his nostrils.

At night, he rode through bitter winds, or broke his fast with the inky outlines of jackals squatting about the rim of the immediate landscape.

He met no man, and had no desire for companionship with the burden of his stern thoughts to attend him.

He did not have the murderer's heart in him; he did not go forward in a whirl of pa.s.sion and fury; it did not once occur to him to ambush the Tarsian; he did not ponder on a plan of action when the moment should arrive; not once did he strike the fatal blow, in his imagination, nor speak with Saul, nor follow himself after the deed was done. His ideas were largely in retrospect, or centered upon the necessity of his work.

His love of Lydia, his love of life, his natural impulses toward generous things were put away from him with firmness, as things which had no place at such a time. His composure was almost resignation. He knew then, that which he had never been able to understand,--how men of great souls and previous n.o.ble lives could in all calmness kill another by design.

A glittering white ridge had shaped itself out of the pale blue sky of an early morning, while yet he rode in the hills. It was Hermon, with the unmelted snows of the winter covering its crown. Opposite it, he came upon another miserable cl.u.s.ter of hovels, the abode of pestilence, want and superst.i.tion, and there found that Saul had pa.s.sed through the village at high noon that day. Marsyas purchased water for his horse and rode on. Saul was now only a half-day's journey ahead of him.

He had come far, without rest. Even now, with the crisis of his long journey at hand, he labored under prostrating weariness and a torturing desire to sleep. He had periods of mental blankness from which he aroused with a start. But as the night's cold deepened, after the day of withering heat, the sharp change added to the weakening influences.

He meditated on the Feast of Junia and the succession of Cla.s.sicus, until his body became a column finishing the front of Agrippa's palace, at which a mob at Baiae threw stones. He flinched, and the night on the desert of Syria pa.s.sed across his vision once more. But it was good to lie down on the couch at the triclinum of Caligula, restful, indeed, if it were sinful. But not for long, because Lydia was beside him, and he spent hours imploring her to give up Jove and pour libations to Jehovah instead, for since Saul of Tarsus was Caesar, she would be chained to a soldier under sentence in the Praetorium. Even now there approached a decurion with manacles thrown over his shoulder!

Again, he saw the drooping head of his horse before him in the dark, the pallid stretch of sand, and felt the sweep of harsh winds on his face.

But Lollia Paulina had laid her sesterces on this worn-out animal, when she knew that Cneius Domitius' horses were the best in the Circus! Why did the woman insist on sitting with him, when she wanted so much to be with the Roman? But n.o.body was good. Even Stephen had died in heresy, and Lydia, for whom he had lost his soul, was an apostate! The mult.i.tude had her! Cla.s.sicus turned his back upon her! Flaccus stood within twenty paces of her and leveled a pilum at her breast! And Saul bound his arms! Help! Mercy--

But a brambly desert shrub had caught at his garments, and its sharp dead thorns had pierced him.

The next mid-morning he rode up a chalky ridge and saw the picture that had brought praise to the lips of the prophets of despair, when Israel was a captive with no hope.

It was a vale so enchanting, so perfect, so golden that he doubted his eyes and feared that it was an unreality the desert had fashioned to lure him on to destruction--or another but kindlier dream.

Yellow roadways, slender and winding, wandered hither and thither through emerald oceans of young grain, past ancient vineyards and orchards of olives, and citrons, and groves of walnuts. Yonder was a cl.u.s.ter of palms, pilasters of silver with feathery capitals, and under it was builded a little town--a hive of soft-colored houses, half smothered in delicate green.

Beyond, the roads spread out again, from their convergence in the little settlement, and ran abroad once more between hedges of roses and oleanders, across the River Pharbar, curving midway across the vale like a simitar dropped in the green, through crowding gardens, among low-lying roofs, past spreading villas of the rich, on to a glittering vision of towers, walls, cupolas, white as frost on the head of Mount Tabor in the morning.

At his feet was Caucabe the Star; in the distance was Damascus.

Marsyas drew up his jaded horse and looked, not at the beauty of the scene, for he did not wish to see it now, but down the roads. Over every yellow ribbon his gaze pa.s.sed until, beyond the limits of the white-towered town, he saw a cl.u.s.ter of small moving figures.

"O rememberer of no wrongs," he said to his horse, "only a little way and thou shall rest and I shall rest!"

He pressed on, past Caucabe the Star, down the hedges of roses between the emerald oceans of young grain and the odorous shade of orchards.

The sun climbed higher, more heated, more merciless; the oleanders gave up their fast fragrance until the night fell again; the vineyards curled, leaf by leaf, the young grain drooped and wilted, the orchards pent in the heat under their boughs, the yellow roads became streaks of bra.s.s and the tyrant of the desert stood at its meridian.

Another stadium, and Marsyas drew up his horse sharply.

Sixty paces ahead was a wayside pool, overshadowed by tall trees--an irresistible invitation to the traveler seeking refuge from the sun. A lean, bowed figure in rabbinical robes stood beside a mule that drank of the spring. Half a dozen men in the garments of Levites stood by their own beasts with rein in hand while they drank.

Marsyas felt in his belt for his knife, and curbing his thirsty horse lowered down on Saul of Tarsus. In his a.s.sociation with hardy pagans, athletae and the exquisite Herod, he had in a measure forgotten the feebleness of Saul.

"He is weak!" he said to himself. "But what mercy hath he shown the weak?"

He recalled the terrible desert, remembered that Saul had sworn to bring back the Nazarenes to Jerusalem for trial--back across that empire of death! And Lydia, gentle and without hardihood, against whom he could not bear to think of the wind blowing strongly, was to go that way!