"They are at their incantations now," said the Centurion. "'Tis a fit place for their abominable orgies. Let us hasten, and we will spoil their wicked spells!" and he gave the command, at which the soldiers rushed forward toward the distant light.

Instantly it disappeared, and when they reached the spot naught was seen, save the tomb of Adauctus; and in the distant darkness was heard the sound of hurrying feet.

"The rats have fled," cried the officer; "after them, ferrets! Let not one escape!" and at the head of the maniple he darted down the echoing corridor.

But Hilarus guided his friends amid the darkness more swiftly than the soldiers could pursue by the light of their torches. He followed many a devious winding, especially contrived to frustrate capture, and facilitate escape. Threading a very narrow pa.s.sage, he drew from a niche a wooden ladder, and placing it against the wall reached a stairway which began high up near the roof. The whole party followed, and Hilarus, drawing up the ladder after him, completely cut off pursuit.

They soon reached the comparatively lofty vaults of a deserted _arenarium_, or sand pit, which communicated with the open air. As he stood with bared brow beneath the light of the silent stars, the good Presbyter Primitius devoutly exclaimed:--"_Anima nostra sicut pa.s.ser erepta est de lagueo venantium_--Our soul is escaped as a bird out the snare of the fowler, the snare is broken and we are escaped."

The writer has not drawn upon his imagination in describing the arrangements for escape made by the persecuted Christians, when taking refuge in these dens and caves of the earth. In this very Catacomb of Callixtus, such a secret stairway still exists, and is ill.u.s.trated by drawings in his book on this subject. The main entrance was completely obstructed and the stairway partially destroyed, so as to prevent ingress to the Catacomb, and a narrow stairway was constructed in the roof which could only be reached by a moveable ladder, connecting it with the floor. By drawing up this ladder pursuit could be easily cut off, and escape to a neighbouring _arenarium_ secured. Stores of corn, and oil, and wine have been found in these crypts, evidently as a provision in time of persecution; frequent wells also occur, amply sufficient for the supply of water; and the mult.i.tude of lamps which have been found would dispel the darkness, while their sudden extinction would prove the best concealment from attack by their enemies. Hence the Christians were stigmatized as a skulking, darkness-loving race,[55] who fled the light of day to burrow like moles in the earth. These labyrinths were admirably adapted for eluding pursuit. Familiar with their intricacies, and following a well-known clew, the Christian could plunge fearlessly into the darkness, where his pursuer would soon be inextricably lost.

Such hairbreadth escapes as we have described from the Roman soldiers, like sleuth hounds tracking their prey, must have been no uncommon events in those troublous times. But sometimes the Christians were surprised at their devotions, and their refuge became their sepulchre.

Such was the tragic fate of Stephen, slain even while ministering at the altar; such the event described by Gregory of Tours, when a hecatomb of victims were immolated at once by heathen hate; such the peril which wrung from a stricken heart the cry, not of anger but of grief, recorded on a slab in the Catacombs: _Tempora infausta, quibus inter sacra et vota ne in cavernis quidem salvari possimus!_--"Oh! sad times in which, among sacred rites and prayers, even in caverns, we are not safe." It requires no great effort of imagination to conceive of the dangers and escapes which must have been frequent episodes in the heroic lives of the early soldiers of the cross.

With what emotions must the primitive believers, seeking refuge in these crypts, have held their solemn worship and heard the words of life, surrounded by the dead in Christ! With what power would come the promise of the resurrection of the body, amid the crumbling relics of mortality! How fervent their prayers for their companions in tribulation, when they themselves stood in jeopardy every hour! Their holy ambition was to witness a good confession even unto death. They burned to emulate the zeal of the martyrs of the faith, the plumeless heroes of a n.o.bler chivalry than that of arms, the Christian athletes who won in the b.l.o.o.d.y conflicts of the arena, or amid the fiery tortures of the stake, not a crown of laurel or of bay, but a crown of life, starry and unwithering, that can never pa.s.s away. Their humble graves are grander monuments than the trophied tombs of Rome's proud conquerors upon the Appian Way. Reverently may we mention their names. Lightly may we tread beside their ashes.

Though the bodily presence of those conscripts of the tomb no longer walked among men, their intrepid spirit animated the heart of each member of that little community of persecuted Christians, "of whom the world was not worthy; who wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth, ... being dest.i.tute, afflicted, tormented."[56]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Latebrosa et lucifugax natio. _Minuc. Felix._

[56] Compare the following spirited lines of Bernis:-- "La terre avail gemi sous le fer des tyrans; Elle cachait encore des martyrs expirans, Qui dans les noirs detours des grottes reculees Derobaient aux bourreaux leurs tetes mutilees."

_Poeme de la Religion Vengee,_ chap. viii.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE DOOM OF THE TRAITOR

But what, meantime, had become of the pursuers? Baffled in their effort to seize their prey, and fearful of losing their way in this tangled labyrinth they had sullenly retreated, tracing their steps by the chalk-marks they had made upon the walls. At last, they returned to the stairway by which they had entered and so found their way above ground.

"This is no work for soldiers," muttered the disgusted officer, "hunting these rats through their underground runs. They are a skulking set of vermin."

"What has become of that coward Greek?" asked the second in command. "He didn't seem to half like the job."

"Is he not here? Then he must have made his escape," said the Centurion.

"But if he is caught in that rat-trap, there let him stay. I'll not risk a Roman soldier's life to save a craven Greek," and he gave the command to march back to the city.

Meanwhile, how fares it with the unhappy Isidorus?

When the soldiers caught sight of the Christians and began their pursuit, he had no heart to join in it, and lingered in the vaulted chamber where the funeral rites had been interrupted. The first thing that caught his eye was the epitaph of the n.o.ble Adauctus. With quavering voice he read the lines we have already given: "With unfaltering faith, despising the lord of the world, having confessed Christ, thou dids't seek the celestial realms."

"And this was he," he soliloquised, "who gave up name, and fame, and fortune, high office, and the favour of the Emperor, and embraced shame, and persecution, and a cruel death for conscience sake. How grand he was that day when I warned him of the machinations of his foes--so undaunted and calm. But grander he is as he lies in the majesty of death behind that slab. I felt myself a coward in his living presence then, but in the presence of this dead map, I feel a greater coward still. His memory haunts, it tortures me, I must away!" and turning from, the chamber, he wandered by the dim light of his taper down the grave-lined corridor, pausing at times to read their humble inscriptions:--

Rudely written, but each letter Full of hope, and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the here and the hereafter.

And their calmness and peacefulness seemed to reproach his conscience-smitten and unrestful soul.

Listlessly he turned into another chamber, when, what was it that met his startled vision!--

VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE.

There slept in the sleep of death another victim of his perfidy, one whom he had longed to save, one whose beauty had fascinated his imagination, whose goodness had touched his heart. Overcome by his emotion he flung himself on the ground, and bursting into convulsive sobs that shook his frame, he pa.s.sionately kissed the cold stone slab on which was written the much-loved name.

"Would that I, too, slept the sleep of death," he exclaimed; "if I might also sleep in peace; if I might seek celestial realms.... So near and yet so far ... A great gulf fixed ... Never to see thee more ... in time nor in eternity."

Here the drip, drip of water which had infiltrated through the roof and fell upon the floor, jarred upon his excited nerves, and suddenly, with a hissing splash, fell a great drop on his taper and utterly extinguished its light. For a moment, so intense and sudden was the darkness, he was almost dazed; but instantly the greatness of his peril flashed upon his mind.

"Lost! Lost!" he frantically shrieked. "The outer darkness, the eternal wailing while she is in the light of life! Well I remember now the words of Primitius, in this very vault, as he spoke of the joys of heaven, the pains of h.e.l.l;" and in the darkness he tried to trace with his finger the words, "DORMIT IN PACE"--"Sleeps in peace."

_"Vale! Vale! Eternum Vale!"_ he sobbed, as he kissed once more the marble slab, "an everlasting farewell! I must try to find the Christians, or the soldiers, or a way of escape from this prison-house of graves."

He groped his way to the door of the vault and listened, oh! so eagerly--all the faculties of his body and mind seeming concentered in his sense of hearing. But "the darkness gave no token and the silence was unbroken." Nay, so awful was the stillness that brooded over this valley of death, that it seemed as if the motion of the earth on its axis must be audible, and the pulses of his temples were to his tortured ear like the roaring of the distant sea.

Venturing forth, he groped his way from grave to grave, from vault to vault, from corridor to corridor, but no light, no sound, no hope! Ever denser seemed the darkness, ever deeper the silence, ever more appalling the gloom. For hours he wandered on and on till, faint with hunger, parched with thirst, the throbbings, of his heart shaking his unnerved frame, he fell into a merciful swoon from which he never awoke.

Centuries after, an explorer of this vast necropolis found crouching in the corner of one of its chambers a fleshless skeleton, and on the tomb above he read the words, VALERIA DORMIT IN PACE. Was it accident or Providence, or some strange instinct of locality that had brought this poor blighted wreck to breathe his latest sigh at the tomb of one whom he had so loved and so wronged?

The peasants of the Campagna tell to the present day of certain strange sounds heard at midnight from those hollow vaults--at times like the hooting of an owl, at times like the wailing of the wind, and at times, they whisper with bated breath, like the moaning of a soul in pain. And the guides to the Catacombs aver, that ever on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Valeria Callirhoe, sighs and groans echo through the hollow vaults--the sighs and groans, tradition whispers, of a wretched apostate who in the ages of persecution betrayed the early Christians to a martyr's doom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROMAN COLUMRARIUM

The Columbaria were the Pagan Roman underground sepulchres. In the many niche-like dovecots--hence the name were placed the urns containing the ashes of the dead whose bodies had been burned on the funeral pile.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER x.x.x.

FATE OF THE PERSECUTORS--TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY.

It remains only to trace briefly the fate of the unfortunate Empress Valeria--less happy than her lowly namesake, the martyr of the Catacombs--and the doom of the persecuting tyrants. In the violent and b.l.o.o.d.y deaths, often more terrible than those which they inflicted on the Christians, which overtook, with scarce an exception, these enemies of the Church of G.o.d, the early believers recognized a divine retribution no less inexorable than the avenging Nemesis of the Pagan mythology.[56]

Diocletian, smitten by a mental malady, abandoned the throne of the world for the solitude of his palace on the Illyrian sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic, where tradition avers that he died by his own hand.

A still more dreadful doom befell the fierce persecutor, Galerius.

Consumed by the same loathsome and incurable disease which is recorded to have smitten his great rivals in bloodshed, Herod the Great and Philip II., from his dying couch he implored the prayers of the Christians, and, stung by remorse for his cruelties, commanded the surcease of their long and bitter persecution.

The Empress Valeria, his widow, by her beauty had the ill fortune to attract the regards of his successor in persecution, the Emperor Maximin. Spurning his suit with the scorn becoming a pure and high-souled woman, at once the daughter and widow of an Emperor, she encountered his deadly hate. Her estates were confiscated, her trusted servants tortured, and her dearest friends put to death.

"The Empress herself," says Gibbon, "together with her mother, Prisca, was condemned to exile; and as they were ignominiously hurried from place to place, before they were confined to a sequestered village in the deserts of Syria, they exposed their shame and distress to the provinces of the East, which during thirty years, had respected their august dignity." On the death of Maximin, Valeria escaped from exile and repaired in disguise to the court of his successor, Licinius, hoping for more humane treatment. But these hopes, to use again the language of Gibbon, "were soon succeeded by horror and astonishment, and the b.l.o.o.d.y execution which stained the palace of Nicomedia sufficiently convinced her that the throne of Maximin was filled by a tyrant more inhuman than himself. Valeria consulted her safety by hasty flight, and, still accompanied by her mother Prisca, they wandered above fifteen months through the provinces in the disguise of plebeian habits. They were at length discovered at Thessalonica; and as the sentence of their death was already p.r.o.nounced, they were immediately beheaded and their bodies thrown into the sea. The people gazed on the melancholy spectacle; but their grief and indignation were suppressed by the terrors of a military guard. Such was the unworthy fate of the wife and daughter of Diocletian. We lament their misfortunes, we cannot discover their crimes."[58]